


opia

by wolfgenes (ruperts)



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: M/M, Witch AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2016-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-15 11:37:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 45
Words: 284,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4605273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruperts/pseuds/wolfgenes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stepping over the collapsed door is a boy, must be around his age, got that bright spark in his blue eyes that spits outraged and unaffected seventeen with the broad shoulders and gloved hands of someone who’s lived far too much for his age. Michael looks at him and then he squints so the image comes into focus, even if it hurts his head to do so. He’s got something in his hands, and there’s fire coming from it. It’s a blow-torch.</p><p>or: <i>michael's only half-good, in a world where you're either good or bad.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. we are the lions, free of the coliseums

**Author's Note:**

> very loosely inspired on _half-bad_ by sally green, heavily inspired by the whole album _save rock and roll_ by fall out boy, and making me so happy i could burst, i introduce to you my new baby: opia!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ i hope you have as much fun reading this as i had writing it. i cannot thank ellie enough for not only being the luke to my michael, for being super excited about goggles and blankets, but also for listening to me talk all the time about this fic. i can't thank you enough for being as into this as i am!! anyway, without further ado, here it is, and i hope you guys enjoy it! (▰˘◡˘▰)

* * *

  **opia**

 _n._  the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable—their pupils glittering, bottomless and opaque—as if you were peering through a hole in the door of a house, able to tell that there’s someone standing there, but unable to tell if you’re looking in or looking out.

* * *

 

([rebloggable](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/127026845435/opia-michaelluke-witch-au-stepping-over-the))

* * *

Michael’s long lost track of time. He’s been hanging from these chains for so long that it feels like his limbs are not attached to his body anymore. It feels both terrible, with the metal cutting the skin of his wrists, his feet touching the floor but no longer supporting him, his head dropped between his shoulders, and like an out of body experience, conscience removed from body, pain just a burning memory from yesterday. He almost feels as if he could open his eyes and look around, but his bravery and stupidity on thinking he could very well find a way to escape his cell has vanished completely after the third or fourth visit from an Order representative, a witch man with long hair held in a ponytail, who slapped his face and yelled at him, asking questions he never knew the answer to.

All around him, is just darkness. Prisoners like him don’t get to see the sunlight at all. If he squints very hard -- and he isn’t going to waste energy on something as pointless as keeping his eyes open, much less forcefully -- he can see the solid door keeping him in the two-meters squared cell, but it’s so dark and dirty that it can be easily confused with the walls. Or by him it can, anyway.

Then there’s a loud thud, and there’s never a loud anything. Whenever the Order comes, they come silently, just to spite Michael’s previous screams that happened when he was first captured. Michael frowns and raises his head to the door, just in time to see the orange vivid light going around the door like beautiful fireworks, sparkly and making the whole cell hot. And just like that, Michael sees it collapse forward, away from him, an unlikely exit to freedom only steps away, if only he could move.

Michael stares. “What the…”

Stepping over the collapsed door is a boy, must be around his age, got that bright spark in his blue eyes that spits outraged and unaffected seventeen with the broad shoulders and gloved hands of someone who’s lived far too much for his age. Michael looks at him and then he squints so the image comes into focus, even if it hurts his head to do so. He’s got something in his hands, and there’s fire coming from it. It’s a blow-torch, and he puts it down as he steps inside of Michael’s cell. He’s got heavy-looking goggles keeping his eyes protected, and when he somehow turns off the blow-torch, the blue and orange flames disappear. It’s been so long since he’s last seen any magic, that he entertains himself with the thought that this is magick, too.

He’s so light-headed he doesn’t understand the first thing the boy says, and when the boy reaches for his wrists over Michael’s head, Michael doesn’t feel the touch of his gloved hands or the weight of any weapons to cut the metal. He notices everything goes dark, and only as an after-thought that it’s because he’s closed his eyes again.

“Are you,” Michael starts, and then stops himself. He coughs, his neglected lungs mad at himself for spending so long in such a small place with next to no oxygen. “Do you work for Mum? For the family?”

The boy in front of him chuckles, and then the chains are off, dropping to the ground loudly, enough that his ears hurt, but he doesn’t complain.

Michael falls heavily, too, feet not ready to support him, but the boy catches him, one gloved hand around his waist and pulling him closer, the other hand doing something with where the chains were attached to, Michael can’t raise his head to look.

“Something like it,” the boy says with a smirk, and Michael stares back at him, head pounding. “Can you stand?”

“I need you to heal me,” Michael says, breathing out heavily. “I can’t do any-fucking-thing like this. I’m too weak. I need you to heal me,” he repeats, urgent.

The boy pauses, looks at him. “I’m not an Order witch. I don’t have any healing powers, Michael.”

Michael shuts his eyes and curses under his breath. He’s expected his Mum to send someone, hoped, prayed desperately, and now that there’s someone, this person isn’t a witch, and can’t heal him. This is the worst news he’s got since a tall witch cornered him with a mean yellow-toothed grin and told him he was arrested for being half-bad.

“I can’t,” he says, and looks over the boy’s shoulder, to the light that hurts his eyes coming from outside his cell. At this rate, he’s not even sure his eyes can take the light, much less his legs take his weight if they’re running away. If a door was taken down, then this surely is an escape. Michael just wishes his head was working fast enough that he could bring himself to even indulge the possibility of running.

The goggled boy in front of him sighs, one hand still holding his waist firmly, and the other reaches for something in his pocket. Michael frowns and stares at it, a long syringe with purple liquid inside. Michael’s never seen anything like it. He’s about to ask what’s this when the boy holds it to his eye level, checking for something, and with a deep breath, he announces:

“This is going to hurt.”

Michael parts his lips to ask, but he’s too weak to catch up with someone who’s healthy. The boy sticks the needle to Michael’s neck, and pushes the content inside. This is the first time Michael screams since his first day here.

First it’s the sting, the needle too thick and intrusive against Michael’s skin, and then it’s the liquid, burning his veins and muscles and making his bones feel weak. Michael screams and falls forward, almost collapses but then feels his muscles getting rigid and stiff. He breathes in and there are tears in his eyes, burning like acid, but as he blinks them away, he realizes he can keep his eyes open. He breathes in, and though air still makes his lungs ache, he can keep on breathing and it doesn’t feel like torture anymore.

Blinking fast as he lets out a chuckle, Michael takes a step back from the boy, opens his palms and looks down at them. He’s bleeding but not much; the cuts of the chains not deep enough to make him bleed to death, but definitely deep enough to leave scars. His palms are dirty with dry blood, a dark tone of red that makes him laugh and shakes his head. It doesn’t matter that it’s his own blood. He can spread his fingertips. It feels amazing.

Plus, he feels like he could take over the world like this. It’s like a liquid injection of spirits up and hopefulness.

“What _is_ this?” he asks, looking again at the boy.

The boy adjusts his goggles with a small smile, apparently proud of himself. “Modified adrenaline.”

Michael chuckles. “You humans develop some weird stuff to compete with magick,” he snorts.

He does register the boy frowning at him and parting his lips like he means to say something, but it’s not the time or place for chatting. Once Michael’s safe with his mother, they can talk, and Michael can properly thank him for the injection of the purple thing that made him feel alive again. For now, they need to run, and that’s exactly what the boy must have in mind, because he grabs his blow-torch, tilts his head to the side, gesturing for Michael to come but behind him, and they start out.

Michael’s bare feet touch the cold floor outside his cell for the first time in who knows how long.

He feels like giggling.

The corridor outside isn’t like Michael remembers it, but then again, his memory is blurry and he doesn’t truly remember much that happened between when he was first brought to the Order Prison and a few seconds ago. It feels like he’s only fully gained conscience again with the modified adrenaline.

“I’m Luke, by the way,” the boy says, nonchalantly, evidently not bothered by the alarms that start sounding madly and echoing in the corridor.

Lights flicker along the halls, and even from where they’re standing, Luke holding his blow-torch steadily before him as they walk quietly down the corridor of Michael’s cell, Michael thinks it looks like a maze they’d never get out of alive. But if his mother sent this Luke person, it must be because she thought him up to the task. Even if he’s not from the Order. Even if he’s human. Which Michael still doesn’t get, but he supposes it’ll make sense once he asks her, and she gives him a painfully logic explanation that would’ve never occurred to him before.

He licks his lips, stopping suddenly. “I’m Michael. And there’s something coming. I can feel it.”

“Oh, I know who you are, obviously,” Luke smiles a wide dimpled smile, and then turns to Michael. “Down,” is all he uses as a warning, and then he’s bringing the blow-torch up and closing one eye. Michael’s eyes widen when he sees Luke turn on the weapon, and throws his body to the side.

He makes it in time, but not because of his instincts. Those still need work. Luke does burn the invisible, though, and the invisible falls down with pained grunts and loud cries. Michael stares in shock as three guards fall down, guns previously aimed at them falling with clicks to the floor.

He’s never seen anyone burn other living people without a second thought, but then again, Michael guesses desperate times call for desperate measures. Luke points at the guns, and Michael takes all three, trying to not look at the two men and the woman lying on the floor, flesh covered in a dark shade of purple, bodies shaking. He takes two guns for himself, and hands Luke another. Luke takes it wordlessly, and they continue forward.

“How did you know,” Michael mutters.

Luke sighs. “Cloaks. They have cloaks now. But the goggles help,” he points at his face, and smiles again.

Michael blinks a couple of times. Just how long did he spend in that fucking cell?

They stay close to walls, walking fast but not making much noise. Michael isn’t sure how is it that human technology makes his legs work again, the pain in his muscles a ghost memory he can hardly put his finger on. He wants to ask about that, whether the pain is gone for good or will come back a thousand times worse once the anesthetic in that shot wears off. He knows if they don’t make it out of the building it won’t make a difference, though.

The alarms make it hard to think, and he remembers a time when he didn’t need silence, when he could focus and do whatever he needed to do even when he was in school, with all the kids his age screaming and playing and being generally as annoying as kids tend to be. And then he remembers, that things like that, being able to focus in the middle of chaos, was what tipped them in. What made them look closer. What made the Order know.

He should’ve listened to his mother. Karen always knew better. Now they were going to be together again, and she could tell him all of her concerned and tear-eyed versions of _I told you so_. And he won’t mind. He’ll smile and hug her close and tell her he’s never disobeying her again.

“Okay, this is it,” Luke stops.

But it’s in the middle of nowhere. They’re at the end of what seems to be the main hall, past at least a hundred of cells with silent and most probably unconscious prisoners inside, and there’s nothing abnormal about this wall. It’s another just like any other, blindingly white, and every other second red with the lights that flicker because of the alarms. Michael wants to ask how come the only guards that came to them were the guards on the floor, but he isn’t sure he wants to know how many were taken down before Luke made it to his cell.

“What now?” Michael asks, frowning.

The exhaustion on his chest is starting to weigh, make him feel heavy, but he’s still strong. His shirt is ripped and the sweatpants he was given are long enough that they cover his ankles completely, and it probably looks like he’s an asylum patient escaping late at night. But Luke doesn’t look at him like he sees any of the obvious. He looks at him like those goggles of him make him see a different world.

He looks at Michael like he sees more than the half-bad convict.

“Now it’s your time to shine, sweetheart,” Luke smirks, pulling his goggles up. His eyes are bluer like this. Then he spreads his arms, just a second later pointing them at the wall. He’s still holding the blow-torch with both hands, the gun Michael gave him tucked in the waist of his black jeans, and Michael thinks it would look comical if he wasn’t feeling so desperate.

He’s a seventeen year old boy pointing two guns at the floor because he can’t remember to keep them up, staring at a blank wall. He manages to murmur, “What the fuck am I supposed to do?” before someone punches the air out of his lungs, and Luke sighs heavily.

Michael’s paying enough attention that he sees Luke putting the goggles back on and swearing a second time, but then he can’t anymore, a knee connecting to his stomach making him cry out loud, louder than the sirens echoing in the open hall. He points his gun to in front of him, but can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Plus, what’s he even pulling the trigger at? The gun might as well ricochet against one of the metal doors.

“What’s happening, Luke?” he yells, impatient, and when he turns to look, what he sees is truly pathetic.

Luke’s being punched by thin air, and he’s punching thin air right back. He sucks on his bottom lip in what looks to be concentration, then raises his blow-torch, still off, and connects it to someone’s jaw. Said someone screams, and then the clock is off, an unconscious body in all-white uniform lying on the floor.

Michael’s being held. He can feel two pairs of hands holding him, and he struggles against them, but then Luke’s standing in front of him with a smirk, and he looks like he’ll fucking light the blow-torch.

“What are you fucking--?! You can’t blow _me_ up,” he yells. Luke completely ignores him, a maniac smile on his face as he turns the weapon on, blue dangerous flames steady and thin coming from inside, and then he takes steps towards them. Michael feels the grip on his arms tighten. “Luke, no!”

“Luke, yes!” he grins, narrowing his eyes behind those goggles of him. “Down, Michael!”

And he supposes that’s one of the things about that modified adrenaline shot, maybe. Or could be just his powers slowly returning. But once the grip on his arms loosen just a tiny little bit, Michael manages to yank his arms back, and he slides down, managing to lie awkwardly face-first on the floor as he hears the screaming start, the heat from the flames close enough that it makes him sweat, but not close enough to hurt.

Michael turns to him with wide eyes, still on the floor. He looks so peaceful, burning the cloaks off. When they eventually fall down, shaking and purple like the other guards had been, Luke turns the blow-torch off, holds it in only one hand as he offers the other for Michael to take, to help him up.

Blinking slowly, he stares at that gloved hand, but from lack of other options, takes it.

“Fast. You have to do your thing before more come.”

“Do my thing,” Michael repeats, slowly, and then louder, sounding more out of control. “Do my thing! Wonderful. You stop in front of a fucking regular wall and tell me to do my fucking thing. What is it exactly that you expect me to do?”

Luke frowns, like he doesn’t understand the outburst, then rolls his eyes. Actually has the nerve to roll his eyes. Kicking the shaking bodies aside like they’re dead weight, Luke clears the path in front of the wall. “I can’t blow this up without affecting the structure of the whole building.”

“And many lives would be lost,” Michael sighs, nodding cautiously.

“Many--” Luke starts, then shakes his head, like it’s irrelevant. “My point being, I need you to open a hole in this wall.”

Michael blinks. “I can’t just do that. I don’t know what Mum told you, but I only changed matter like twice, and by accident,” he frowns, heart speeding up, the memories of those times making him too uncomfortable. He presses his lips together for a moment, afraid he’ll ruin the plan, and shakes his head almost violently. “No, no, no. I can’t. I just can’t.”

Sighing softly, Luke looks around for good measure, and then finally pulls the goggles up again. He touches Michael’s shoulder, looking him in the eye. “We don’t have time for the you-can-do-this and I-believe-in-you pep talk, Michael. You do this, or we’re both captured, and this time, we both die.”

In panic, he scoffs. “No pressure.”

Luke smirks, as if he likes that a lot. “Exactly.”

First he drops his guns.

Taking a deep breath, he turns away from Luke, and back at the wall. He raises his hands to chest level, and closes his eyes for a second. Michael thinks of that wall, visualizes it in his head with a hole in it, big enough that they can both flee. He feels his eyes start to roll back, opens his eyes but he sees nothing, or nothing like he usually would, anyway. What he sees isn’t the wall, but the dead energy around it that all inanimate things have. He sees Luke’s energy, too, blue and vibrant like the fire of the blow-torch he carries around like it’s his pet. Michael ignores him, and focuses on the dead colorless wall, spreads his fingertips so much it hurts his abused skin.

Michael mutters, but he doesn’t know what words come out. It doesn’t make sense, because these aren’t regular words. They’re words from the soul, not from the mouth.

This is his magick taking action.

He brings his hands together. He hears something, but the noises are muffled, and he trusts Luke to handle whatever needs handling while he does this, while he channels his energy flow with that of the wall. Michael needs to focus on this, and ignore whatever other energies are in conflict behind him.

Michael takes another deep breath, feels the air flood his lungs, and this time it doesn’t burn. This time, it washes away all the pain. He could almost call it healing, if he wasn’t only half-good. Pushing the thought aside, he abruptly separates his hands, space growing between them until he sees the dead colorless energy flow separate in front of him, too.

He blinks again, feels his eyes rolling back when he opens his eyes.

In front of him, there’s a wall with a hole in it. Not big enough that it could mean anything significant to the structure of the building, and barely big enough that one person can pass at a time, but definitely big enough that Michael can see they’re not on ground floor. Or the first, for that matter.

Where they are, it’s high. High enough that it makes Michael hold his breath.

“Nice! You did it! Perfect,” Luke breathes out with a shaky little laugh, and when Michael turns to him, he can see the guards closing in on them, not bothering with cloaks this time. There’s at least twenty, they all seem armed to the teeth. Michael blinks cautiously, trying to calm down his speeding heart. “Alright, hold my hand,” he says, already taking Michael’s hand instead of waiting for Michael to react.

Michael doesn’t get it. Is this one of those things people like to do seconds before dying, so it soothes their soul? Humans _are_ strange. Michael frowns and stares at their hands enlaced together, almost offended at the sight, but Luke’s pulling him towards the opening, and as Michael starts to understand, he wishes he didn’t.

“No,” he says, in a warning tone, but Luke only winks at him, and pulls.

When Luke jumps, his only option is to jump with him, otherwise left alone with white-uniformed guards that will most likely kill him if he stays. Michael is sure, however, that this is his death, and in an ironic way, he’s glad that at least the torture is over. His head is clear enough now that he knows Luke can’t have injected him with anything that will take all the pain away permanently, and he isn’t sure he ever wants to feel it again. Maybe this is for the best.

Michael breathes in as if for good luck, that whatever comes next is easier and simpler.

And then he closes his eyes.

As he leaps forward, Luke’s hand is the only thing Michael touches at all. His body falls heavily and he closes his eyes to brace himself for the worst. He’s about to let go of the hand of his mother’s suicidal lackey when he feels Luke move him around, and he snaps his eyes open with a frown. One of Luke’s hands go to the back of his neck, slapping the place there, but Michael doesn’t have the time or energy to ask.

It’s the weirdest thing, opening your eyes as your body free-falls parallel to an enormous building, and a tall boy wraps his arms around you, goggles on, maniac smile, and looks perfectly comfortable like this, arms enlacing around you as if he’s giving you a hug. Michael would yell at him, but he figures: they’re both going to die anyway. What the hell.

It’s surprisingly soothing, being in someone’s arms, even a stranger’s, seconds before death.

Only death doesn’t come. Not yet. What comes is the sucker punch of his fall stopping abruptly, air around him almost solidified with how it changes, and Michael bets that if he was watching it happen with his other eyes, then he’d see the particles in the air change shape, too, all to accommodate them, levitate them, make them gravitate towards the ground more gracefully, not as fast, not as dangerously.

This is Order magick.

Michael takes a deep breath, feeling sick in his stomach, but also feeling relief being shot through his veins. It’s both good, because it means his mother is probably close, and terrible, because his last memories with the Order aren’t the best.

On the ground, there are two women sitting in the trunk of a jeep. One of them has long neon blue hair, she’s wearing heart-shaped red sunglasses, a white dress and a pair of platform white sneakers. She’s moving her hands in the rhythm that they fall. She’s the Order witch controlling their fall. The other is a dirty blond girl sitting cross-legged, in a black crop shirt and red plaid jeans. She’s wearing black combat boots and has what appears to be heavy black jewelry around her neck. She’s not wearing sunglasses; as they get closer to the ground, Luke still perfectly attached to him, Luke’s eyes connect with the girl not using her magick.

It’s just the two of them and the car. Michael doesn’t see Karen yet. He misses his mother.

And then they’re landing on the ground.

It’s still daylight, but not by much. The sunset’s hiding behind one of the many buildings of the big city, but that’s not what Michael’s thinking of. Michael’s looking around with wide-eyes, his feet touching the pavement and making shivers of cold go up his spine as he blinks and sees all the small things he hadn’t even thought of himself worthy of missing. The traffic lights, the passing people who won’t even blink an eyelash at a boy like him, or maybe they would, maybe--

He turns to Luke, lips parted to ask a question, but he’s smiling to the two girls, almost oblivious to Michael for the first second. Then the blond one clears her throat, and Luke turns to Michael with a grin. “Wasn’t that awesome?!” he smirks, adjusting his goggles. “Your hair looks terrible, but I guess a free fall would do that to a person.”

Michael ignores him. “Did you put one of those cloak things on me? People are…” he looks away from Luke again, looking over his shoulder, and then around, until he’s glanced at all the people ignoring him. “People don’t see me.”

Luke nods. “Yep. I’ll take it off once we get in the car, though, don’t worry. Just figured it would cause looks if two dudes were falling off an Order building,” he shrugs, grinning maliciously, and the blue-haired girl smirks, like there’s some private joke there that Michael’s failing to see.

He kind of wants to ask how these cloak things work, and when did they become a thing, but now’s not the time. Now’s not the time for any talking, apparently, because Luke’s looking back at him with reticent eyes, like he expects Michael to say something meaningful next, and Michael’s mind is blank. He’s sort of still stuck on jumping out of a building through a hole he conjured on the wall, sure of his death, and now this. His brain isn’t processing it very well.

The blond girl sighs and gets off the car. She cracks her knuckles and stares right at Michael like she means to say something, then decides it’s not worth it, and gets in the car through the passenger seat door. Michael stares at the space where she was sitting, making a mental note to tell his mother that she’s the rudest one, barely seems like an Order witch at all.

The girl in heart-shaped sunglasses sighs and says, “Alright. Let’s go,” and does the same as the other girl had done before, except she’s going to be the one driving, apparently.

Which leaves Michael and Luke alone by the side of the building, looking at each other, and Michael isn’t sure how come they’re not running for their lives yet, how there aren’t guards streaming down the front entrance like bees that have had their nest poked. So he bites his lip and frowns, taking a few steps towards Luke.

“Where’s Mum?” he sighs, tired and disoriented.

Luke takes a deep breath and then makes a face, shrugging. Michael frowns, but still lets him come closer. When Luke touches his wrist, Michael’s taken back to just a minute ago, when they were deciding to take the leap, holding hands so they wouldn’t fall to their deaths alone. It makes him flinch uncomfortably, shift his weight to the other foot, but he finds that he can’t, not exactly. Not move as much as he’d liked to.

When he stares down at his hand, he sees that Luke wasn’t so much touching his wrist as he was attaching something to it. It’s a thin metal bracelet with three strange white gems in it. They’re different than anything Michael’s ever seen.

“What’s this?” he asks, but as he raises his hand to inspect the bracelet with his other hand, Luke’s fingertips touch his wrist lightly, and then the other, connecting them, and just like that, the metal expands, and wraps Michael’s other hand together, like a handcuff. “What the fuck?!” he yells, taking a step back as a knee-jerk reaction, eyes widening and staring at Luke in betrayal.

Luke tsks, then shrugs again. “Well--” he starts.

Michael cuts him off, screaming higher: “You-- you said you were human!”

“Did I, though?” Luke frowns, making a face. “I said I wasn’t Order.”

Though Luke’s just standing there in front of him, still with his ridiculous goggles of bronze and leather, smiling like he may add an ‘oopsie’ to his revelation, Michael feels as if he’s been slapped. He holds his breath, parting his lips, but he can’t make his voice work. Again when he finally surrenders and breathes out and then in, air seems toxic and hurtful against his poor lungs. He tries forcing his wrists apart, but the metal hold is too tight and his wrists are already hurt and abused.

If he isn’t Order, but he is a witch, then, obviously, he must be… Chaos.

“Your Dad says hello,” Luke raises his eyebrows with a smile.

* * *

 


	2. do you got room for one more troubled soul?

"How many hours, Halsey?" the blond girl asks, throwing one of her feet up on top of the panel of the car. She's chewing gum, pink bubble coming from her mouth and being sucked back in. 

Michael watches her profile in scowling silence. If she notices, she just doesn't care about Michael enough to look at him. He wonders if she's another Chaos witch, like Luke, working for his father. Working for Daryl. But the other girl, the one with the heart-shaped sunglasses, she has to be Order. Her magick is telekinesis. It's Order magick. 

Then again, he can't think of a single reason why an Order witch would be working with Daryl. Especially displaying her Order magick in front of Chaos. If he's honest, really honest with himself, he knows none of this makes sense. It's keeping his beliefs grounded on none of this being real that stops him from panicking. If he insists on how little sense this makes, he's back in his cell, being tortured and slowly killed over who knows how long, but at least he isn't on his way to something worse. 

Karen didn't shield Michael from Chaos and his father for this. This can't be it. 

Heart-shaped sunglasses, Halsey, sighs softly. "Another twenty hours or so. But when the morning comes we're staying at a motel. It's not safe to travel in daylight," she notes, raising an eyebrow to Luke through the rearview mirror. 

Blondie shrugs. "Have it your way."

Luke holds eye-contact with Halsey for another second. It doesn't escape Michael, the tension going between them, and Michael can't think of why, but they're keeping something from the second girl, the one now rubbing the sleeve of her jacket on the side of her black combat boot. Michael only glances Luke's way briefly, but Luke flashes him a smile. 

Unbelievable. The guy made of a magick inhibitor bracelet into handcuffs and restrained him, took him by force to a jeep, and now he's smiling sweetly with those bronze and leather goggles on his face, like they're close friends, like they'll soon be laughing about this. 

Michael scoffs. He'd very much like to punch Luke in the face. 

Looking at him with curious eyes behind those goggles, Luke tilts his head to the side for a second. Michael looks at him again, because he’s being stared at, and it’s unnerving. The Chaos witch brings his hand up and, unexpectedly, raises his index finger to Michael’s face. Michael frowns and pulls back, a mix of appalled and simply confused, and Luke pokes Michael’s cheek with his finger.

Since he doesn’t smile, he’s left staring at Luke while he feels his finger poking at his cheek, feels it against his teeth. Michael eventually snorts and shakes his head so Luke lowers his hand, and then asks: “Just what the fuck are you doing?”

Luke shrugs. “You’ve been quiet.”

“Maybe I _am_ quiet. You don’t know me.” Michael tries to make the words sting, but they probably just sound hurt instead. 

Luke blinks a couple of times, like he doesn’t get why Michael’s being like this. 

Michael’s tired, too. He needs to sleep. He hasn’t slept in days. Maybe weeks? He doesn’t remember. His days after he got arrested by the Order are a blur, but he thinks maybe he wasn’t allowed to sleep. He thinks he was being kept awake, to keep talking, all about things he didn’t know shit about. It was about Daryl. All he knows about Daryl is what everyone knows. The only difference that being his son brought was that he learned to hate Daryl from a young age.

Watching Luke raise his hand again, this time he decides he’s going to try and bite Luke’s finger off. Sure the bracelet-slash-handcuffs make him powerless, but his teeth are still working fine. But Luke doesn’t try to poke his face anymore. He reaches for Michael’s neck, his palm curling around the back of Michael’s neck. Luke shifts closer to him, and Michael holds his breath.

This time, he sounds small when he asks: “What… what are you doing?”

Luke ignores him at first, and Michael can’t look him in the eye, even through the enormous goggles. He suddenly can’t even make himself register the presence of the two girls in the front seats, too focused in keeping himself breathing with Luke coming closer, his fingers curling around the end of Michael’s hair, feeling the skin of his neck.

The heat that comes to his face is terrible. He’s glad his magick doesn’t involve fire.

“Here,” Luke says softly, and just like that, he pulls at Michael’s skin, and Michael screams.

It’s the second time Michael screams loudly as if his life is being drained out of him in Luke’s presence, and by Luke’s doing. He’d say it isn’t the best of histories. It does feel as if Luke’s pulling at his skin, though, but when Luke pulls away with a victorious smile on his face, Michael sees something in his hands. It’s like a small chip, transparent like glass, not more than an inch in width, way too thin. 

Michael’s hands strain against the bracelets that keep his wrists together. His knee-jerk reaction is to rub the sore spot, but he can’t, and it makes his shoulders jerk forward and back, helpless. Luke sighs softly, and seems to take pity in that, putting his hand right back where it was, warm fingers rubbing it for Michael. Michael only scowls at him, though, not buying into the sympathy act.

If Luke cares at all for his scowls, he doesn’t show. Instead, he puts the chip in the pocket of his jeans, and with his free hand, the one not massaging the back of Michael’s head, he pulls his goggles up to his head. “There. Now the cloak is off,” he smiles.

“That hurt,” he points out redundantly, staring.

“Yeah,” Luke nods, instead of apologizing, and lets go of Michael’s neck, too. Michael almost misses the warmth of his fingers before he remembers it’s traitor Luke, who rescued him but is taking him to Daryl. “Anyway, you said I don’t know you. That’s bullshit. _Everyone_ knows you.”

Michael doesn’t know what to say to that, so he tells himself this is just another absurd part of his terrible daydream, where the back of his neck still hurts, and he can still feel the ghost touch where warmth once was. He looks away from Luke and out of the window instead, breathing in and out hard and telling himself that, if anything, this will all be over soon.

For better or for worse.

* * *

Next time Michael takes notice of who he is, where he is, and who he’s with, he’s got his head against Luke’s shoulder, and he hears people laughing. That’s the order of things he registers: first the solidness of Luke’s shoulder supporting him, then the sound of the girls laughing, along with Luke. Then one of the girls say: “God, I know, I can’t even blame Dylan? We’ll go get him before someone kills him, though. Any word on Ashton?” and that’s how he knows they’re not laughing about him, but about someone else. 

The jolts of pain come in waves, the first so sudden and strong that he drops his head back against the seat of the car, his rigid arms going up and trying to stretch, but the bracelet is keeping his wrists secured together. His eyes roll back but his magick doesn’t come, and it’s like something’s burning through him. He hears Luke calling out his name, the girls in the front seats growing quiet, and he wants to scream, but even with his mouth open wide, no sound comes. 

He’s shaking, but his eyes are coming back, and when he finally forces his mouth closed, Luke’s sitting beside him, with both of his hands on Michael’s arms, rubbing his skin, but he’s got no healing powers, so he doesn’t get what’s the point of that, not immediately anyway. Then the wave of cold comes, and he gets it. His chin shudders and he connects his eyes with Luke’s very briefly before he sets his jaw and feels himself jerk forward like he doesn’t have any control of his body anymore. Luke catches him, ready, pulls him closer, says: “There’s a blanket just under my seat. Think you can wait a second?” he searches Michael’s eyes, frowning softly.

It’s hard to keep his vision set on one thing, but his whole body is shaking, and he doesn’t understand why it hurts so much, his muscles burning, his skin rejecting the air around it like it’s poisonous. Michael forces himself to nod, and it comes with great effort, even that.

But he’s better now, just cold and in pain, in a shaking body that won’t respond to him, and with magick fighting to come back to him when the bracelet won’t let it. He sees it when Luke searches through his belongings under his seat in the jeep, Halsey giving him a brief look through the rearview mirror. When she sees him looking, she looks away. The second girl doesn’t even seem to have bothered to look over her shoulder, but her foot isn’t on the car panel anymore. She’s looking out the window, with the glass rolled all the way up.

Luke places the blanket around his shoulders, and then his arms on top of that. “What you--” he tries, but he has to clear his throat, and it hurts like he’s swallowing something that cuts him from inside.

“Body heat,” he says quietly. Michael barely feels his hands and arms around him, though, and that’s maybe why he doesn’t argue more. He’s too focused on the excruciating pain that start at his feet and run up his legs, his torso, down his shoulders and arms until it reaches his bloody hands. He closes his eyes for a second, breathing in courage, but it only makes his head pound more, and he’s still so cold. “It’s the anesthetics wearing off, along with the painkillers. I know exactly what it feels like, and it’s awful,” Luke adds the last word with a bit of a chuckle, raising the first vowel sound up. 

He stays quiet for as long as his body shakes, and everyone in the car accepts to follow his rule of silence. Michael doesn’t know how long it takes, but he feels it’s too long. When he starts feeling like it’s only pain and no more cold, he still doesn’t want to let go of the blanket, but pulls back from Luke’s embrace. Luke lets him, adjusting the blanket around his shoulders wordlessly, looking down with a frown that doesn’t look too happy.

Michael sighs. “This is worse.”

“What do you mean?” Luke raises his eyebrows up, blinking at him.

“Worse than when I was with the Order,” he says. 

And he can tell that this much gets to Luke, because his frown grows deeper and he shakes his head slowly. He sucks on his bottom lip, and Michael notices for the first time the black ring piercing around it. Luke sighs softly and eventually looks away, apparently deciding it’s not worth arguing on it. But Michael thinks he’s managed to hurt Luke back, and he’s almost proud.

Still in pain, so much pain he just wants to fall asleep again, fall into a dreamless world that will make everything disappear for a while, but still, he’s almost proud.

He keeps his eyes down between his legs, staring at the leather of his seat, the awful faded gray of his sweatpants. His T-shirt is ripped on so many places that it probably can’t be saved, but he thinks he’s keeping this blanket. For whatever happens next, if he makes it out alive, he’s claiming this blanket as his, as a trophy. It’s the first thing to not betray his needs. 

Michael shoots Luke a betrayed look again, and finds that Luke’s still looking at him, frowning and staring, sucking on the black metal, looking like he’s trying to understand.

Holding the eye-contact for a few seconds, he keeps it just until he feels the car slowing down. Then he looks out the windshield glass ahead, sees Halsey parking into a spot by the back of an old street motel. In orange neon letters, it reads: TIME OF YOUR LIFE. Michael scoffs, staring at the neon lights, and Halsey stops the car, takes the key off the ignition, and announces she’ll be back with two room keys soon.

“About Dylan,” blondie starts, finally looking over her shoulder, but it’s at Luke, not at Michael. “Are we going to wait until we hear from Ashton, or nah?”

Luke sighs heavily, running his hand over his head, carefully avoiding the goggles. “I don’t know. I think we should probably wait for Ashton. Dylan still has a couple of days, and we can’t risk going in twice. Especially not after…” he tilts his head to the side, at Michael, and Michael rolls his eyes.

Blondie nods quietly, then says: “Think Daryl would be mad if I killed his boy?” she teases.

Michael stares at her. It’s not the killing part that makes him wrinkle his nose. It’s referring to him as Daryl’s boy. He tastes bile in his mouth, and it isn’t from all the pain. If he could, he’d definitely use his magick to break free from this gang of freaks, but in the lack of that possibility, he’d just like to have his hands free so he could pull the blankets tighter around himself.

“Geordie,” Luke says, in a warning tone, but she doesn’t look intimidated.

Her eyes are still on Michael, and she has a mean smile on her lips. “What? You know about the prophecy. We’d be doing Boss a favor, if you ask me.”

“But I’m not,” Luke says, matter-of-factly, and then: “I was going to go find a payphone to call the others, let them know everything went alright and we have Michael, but now I’m afraid to leave you two alone,” he raises his eyebrows, and he looks almost playful, but Michael recognizes something there, an undertone of threat that makes blondie, Geordie, roll her eyes and give them her back again, staring ahead. 

Luke chuckles, then bumps his shoulder to Michael’s. 

“Don’t worry,” he whispers, even though Geordie can still probably hear them. “She’s harmless.”

Luke smiles at him, winking, and Michael chuckles back, not because he thinks it’s funny, but. 

Geordie flips him off without turning to look again.

When Halsey comes back with the keys, Michael realizes he should be scared of being alone again with a Chaos witch, but he’s just so tired that there isn’t energy in him left for feeling any horror. Instead he squints at the dawn, trying to zone out from the quiet chattering between Luke, Halsey, and Geordie. Eventually the girls are off one way, and Luke walks to him. 

Still staring at the orange lights that will soon be the sun, Michael thinks back of hours ago, when he saw the orange flames from Luke’s blow-torch and thought of them as fireworks. It was the first colorful thing he’d seen in so long. He sighs. If he really wanted, maybe he could make a run for it, even with his hands restrained, but his legs are hurting and his body is exhausted.

He turns to Luke, the blanket still around his shoulders, and with a hint of annoyance in his voice, says: “Lead the way.”

Luke doesn’t look like he’s completely on board with the tone Michael used, but instead of arguing, he does lead the way, trusting that Michael won’t run. If what he said is true and he’s been injected with modified adrenaline before, perhaps it’s not on trust -- which would be stupid, quite honestly, as Michael’s mind is just too tired to come up with ways to escape them, at all costs -- but simply because he knows what the after-effects are. 

“It’s here,” he says, quietly, stopping in front of Room 93. He turns the key, opens the door, and waits for Michael to walk in first. 

Rolling his eyes, he does, but it’s only once he’s past that he understands why. Luke does something to the door from outside, before he’s in, fingertips touching the lock as he blinks and his eyes roll back. Michael stares, helpless, had never been in a position to watch Chaos magick happen before, except for his own, and he knows that doesn’t count. 

Before, when Luke had made the bracelet wrap around his other hand too, he wasn’t looking Luke in the eye. He’d missed the petrol blackness in his eyes, how they widen in complete darkness and then, with another blink and a small smile, they’re back to human-looking blue.

Michael looks away, standing in the middle of room 93, sleepy but unwilling to start toward any of the beds.

After that, Luke closes the door and locks it with the key, too, as if that’s what’s going to make a real difference. He stretches his arms and yawns, and of course listening to that only makes Michael want to yawn, too, but he fights the urge, biting the insides of his cheeks, just another small pain to add to the overall picture.

He’s so tired he wants to cry.

Luke walks to in front of him, three or four feet between them, and sighs. “Okay, you don’t have to hate me. I’m just doing my job here,” he spreads his arms, as if giving up, and Michael rolls his eyes.

“You’re taking me to Daryl. Of course I hate you.”

Shifting his weight to the other foot, Luke sighs, frustrated. For a second, Michael thinks he’s going to argue with him, but then his expression softens, and he says: “Shit, you were under that Order juice that keeps you awake all the time. You _need_ to sleep,” he says, tone suddenly urgent, and then he walks to the closest bed, the single bed closest to the wall of the door, and he pulls the sheets and blanket aside, gesturing for Michael to come closer. Michael doesn’t move. “C’mon, c’mon! I promise you’ll feel so much better once you sleep for good. I can talk the girls into waiting a couple more hours if you need ‘em.”

“Very kind,” Michael scoffs, but reluctantly puts one foot in front of the other, until he’s standing just next to the bed. Luke pets the bed with helpful big eyes, and Michael rolls his, though he does sit. He looks down, and he looks like complete shit, feet black with dirt of walking barefoot and brown with weeks old blood. He has several cuts of different sizes down his arms, and his wrists look the worst. His face probably doesn’t look much better. Instead of addressing any of that, he says, still staring at his lap. “Well, it’s not like your promise is worth anything. Your word means nothing.”

Luke kneels down on the floor so he’s not on eye-level with Michael, but under. Michael cocks an eyebrow and stares at him, until Luke’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking comfortable in his combat boots and skinny black jeans, black T-shirt and jacket, faded gloves and bronze and leather goggles. He removes the gloves of one hand first, the other already removed when Michael wasn’t seeing, probably to do whatever he did to the door, and then he removes his goggles, putting it carefully on top of the gloves, just in front of him. Michael keeps staring, until Luke looks back at him.

“I always keep my word, and I never lied,” he notes, sounding atypically serious, no trace of smile on his face. “I mean, what do you expect from me? I’m Chaos. Of course I have fun twisting words. But I don’t lie. Ever.”

Michael narrows his eyes, staring at him, unsure whether he’s even worth the trouble of explaining that there isn’t much difference between leading someone to believe in something untrue and actively lying. Instead he just ends up shrugging and shaking his head.

“It’s true!” Luke insists, now a hint of smile on his face. “Ask me anything, and I’ll answer truthfully.”

Snorting, Michael says: “You do realize I know you can just lie about whatever, right?”

With a smile on the corner of his mouth, Luke shrugs back. “Indulge me.”

“I’m disgusting,” he says instead, shaking his head to shake away the doubts that he knows won’t be answered by some Chaos witch that carries around a blow-torch. “I need a shower.”

“After you sleep. You’re not strong enough for anything but sleep,” Luke says quietly.

Michael looks at him again, his blue eyes narrowed in distrust as he scans Luke’s face for something, he just isn’t sure what exactly. Karen had warned him against Chaos witches, that act in the shadows where the government of the Order can’t see them, their powers all gifts of the unknown and not nature, all there to cause imbalance, screw up with everything natural and true.

She’s warned him about Daryl’s followers, too. No Chaos witch is really anything but a Daryl follower, she’d said countless times. Michael should watch out, because they were all devouts and had blind faith that Daryl would give something back to their community, but all he ever did was kill. Killing thousands of lives of innocent Order witches and humans may give some Chaos witches revenge they seek, but it isn’t the same as giving back to the community. He’s not the type of leader anyone chooses. It’s the type of leader that ascends to power and no one is strong enough to fight him, so everyone obeys and lives by his rules.

The war he’d started, a little before Michael was born, it was pure brutality. It was genocide. One third of all Order witches were killed. Countless humans. All before he’d taken Karen, and many years later, Michael had to learn that his father wasn’t killed in the Magick War like he was led to believe and everyone around him still did, back then. His father was the Apocalypse Horseman himself. 

And he knew, from age eleven, that half of him was made of all of that cruelty.

And Luke? He’s one hundred percent made of fully-black eyes and magick that disrupts nature.

Michael turns to him. “Have you killed before?” At that, Luke nods easily, and Michael snorts, disgusted. “How could you be so okay with that? It’s horrifying.”

Sighing quietly, Luke looks away from a second, staring at the carpet underneath him. “Well, my big brother Ben was killed in the Magick War, along with my parents, but that was-- that’s not the order it happened, I’m always so bad with telling stories,” he looks back at Michael with a silly face, and Michael looks back, sitting on the bed, quiet. “Okay, so when the war started, I was like one or two years old. Dad was hunted down and killed, and Ben saw it all, so he was all… he was a bit fucked up, I guess. Mum and Jack -- that’s my other brother -- didn’t want me to spend any time with Ben, but he was my big brother, and I looked up to him a lot,” he rolls his eyes with a dorky smile, and then back at Michael. “Anyway, so a few years later, I’m six and the war is almost over, but Ben finally finds the Order witches who killed my Dad. He tries to fight them, but he isn’t strong enough, so Mum has to try and help, but they both end up getting killed. I was crying, but Jack was like,” he starts gesturing, then stops himself, like he can’t figure out how to make his hands work. “Jack covered my mouth, so I couldn’t,” he breathes out heavily, blinking a couple of times, then looks back at Michael. There’s unnerving certainty in his voice when he says: “Maybe my brother was one of them, even if it hurts, but it doesn’t change that, overall? Some people just don’t deserve to live.”

The story doesn’t add up, is the first thing Michael notices.

He knows the war still lasted for a few years after he was born. He was kept away from it, because Karen had fled to the countryside, so far away from the city and where all the death was happening that the first time he heard about the Magick War, it was from humans who were curious about the casualties, and that was before humans started dying, too. Michael must’ve been eight or so by the time the war ended, but nobody ever talked about Chaos witches dying. 

They were the killers. They were the murderers. The Order was there to stop them, restrain them, and bring them to the Order Prison. It’s the only reason the building is so packed with criminals. They’re all there to be stopped from starting another Magick War.

What he ends up saying is, quietly, unsurely: “They wouldn’t -- they wouldn’t hurt anyone. The Order just doesn’t… The Order doesn’t kill.”

Luke must sense something in his voice, because of the way he looks at Michael, then. Instead of entering defensive mode, like Michael’s sure he would have, had their roles been reversed, Luke sits up on his legs, sighs briefly, and tells him:

“Jack, my brother, the one who made sure I lived when Ben and Mum died… Once, Jack and I were on a mission. Jack found a drug pill, it was this size,” Luke closes one of his eyes, brings his index and thumb fingers close, an inch or two of space between them. “We couldn’t let the Order have it, so we started running, but they were about to catch us, and Jack knew what type of thing they’d do with the drug, so he gave it to me.”

Michael’s sitting on the bed so his dirty feet are only touching the floor. He already feels as if he’s making the bed dirty enough by just sitting on it. He’s so sleepy he can feel his body swaying just a tiny little bit as Luke talks, but his muscles still ache and his head still pounds. He’s glad for the warmth of the blanket still over his shoulders. 

“You mean, like, he gave you the drug so you could keep it?”

“No,” Luke says, still sitting on his legs eagerly, and a sly smile spreads over his lips. “I took it.”

Michael snorts, shaking his head. He can’t tell how Luke taking drugs has anything to do with any of this, but something about the almost childish way he says it makes Michael chuckle. It’s just a second, and soon he’s made of seriousness and hesitance again, but it happens. For a split second, it happens. 

“The human scientists were developing a drug to try and make witches,” he starts, but Michael cuts him off, scoffing.

“You can’t _make_ witches. You’re born one.”

Luke cocks an eyebrow. “Well, that’s what they were trying to prove wrong. They made this drug, that was supposed to develop magick in you. Something specific. Mind control,” he says simply, the last two words like they’re feathers, completely weightless, and Michael starts wondering if this is all lies, and Luke’s never even had any brothers to start with. Michael sighs, and maybe Luke can tell that it’s a bit too much to ask him to believe in that, because he says, serious and urgent: “I passed out. Thought I was going to die. That’s when they gave me the modified adrenaline. Then I was sure I was going to die, because I kept feeling magick that wasn’t mine, fighting to come to life, fighting my own.”

Michael doesn’t know what to think, so he lets his mind be blank. He looks at Luke, holds his breath for a couple of seconds, taking in the desperation that shadows Luke’s eyes for a moment, as the memories seem to haunt him. Michael asks, quietly: “Then what?”

“Then they wanted the drug, of course,” Luke sighs, looking away quietly. “The Order wanted the drug. I never even knew if it worked at all, because they wanted it back.”

He’d ask why, but he has a feeling he won’t need to.

It still makes him a little sick, how Luke seems to hesitate for the first time in these hours they’ve met, how he takes a deep, deep breath, and then Michael remembers himself, taking a deep breath for good luck before he jumped off the hole he made on the wall of the Order Prison building. Luke breathes in something and Michael thinks he sees himself there, even if briefly, and even if it could only be half of him. Then he understands why Luke’s sat on his legs to start with. Luke touches his lower belly, pulling his shirt up just until his navel.

“They started here,” he says, looking down, and Michael follows his eyes. There’s a horizontal scar, skin that doesn’t seem to have scarred well, thick and long, and then Luke moves on, lifting his shirt up, adding, “then here,” and: “then here,” until he’s got his shirt lifted all the way up to his chest.

His chest is a map of cuts, the type you don’t get out of alive. There’s a single vertical cut, from the spot where his collarbone ends all the way down to his navel, and three more horizontal ones along his chest and stomach. Some of them have tiny black spots, like someone tried to stitch him back together but didn’t know what they were doing. The thinnest of his scars, the horizontal one a full hand under his nipples, must be at least half an inch thick. 

Michael doesn’t know when he parts his lips, when he moves so the blanket falls to the bed and he’s resting his elbows on his knees, watching more closely. All he knows is that when he looks back to Luke’s face, to his eyes, he sees something that could not be misread. It’s fear, and considering Michael’s the one who’s been kidnapped and is being kept here against his will, he can’t come up with a single reason why.

Still he wants to say this can’t have been the Order’s doing. Maybe it was his people, Chaos people, wanting the drug Jack was supposed to have given to Daryl but instead gave to his little brother. Michael wants to defend the people who raised him before they turned their backs on him, wants to say Luke’s got it all wrong.

What comes out of his mouth instead is a shaky: “What did they _do_ to you?”

Luke half-smiles, pulls his shirt down again, and falls back on the carpet so he’s sitting cross-legged again. “They tried to look for something in me that still had enough of the drug that they could reproduce it. Couldn’t find it, so they just kept digging,” he shrugs quietly, staring down, and Michael can’t stop staring at his shirt, at where he was staring at scars just a second ago. Luke probably feels self-conscious at that, Michael’s eyes and his frown, but Michael can’t bring himself to look away, or to let his thoughts become linear, can’t let them make any sense. “I was awake for all of that, too,” he adds, with a sigh, like he’s tired of talking about it, but can’t stop that, anymore than Michael can stop looking. “I kept begging for them to just kill me, but they wouldn’t do it,” he rolls his eyes, like this is the part he resents most. Not the torture, not opening his chest up with him awake. Not killing him. That’s the part that stuck to him the most. “So anyway,” he looks back at Michael, a mischievous smile coming back to his lips, so comfortable there, it’s like it’s never left. “Tragic backstory unlocked!” he mocks, smiling widely.

Michael chuckles, but his heart’s not in it. He’s too shocked to pretend like it’s funny, too scared to pretend like he doesn’t believe in it.

“I guess if you’ll believe in anything I say at all, it should be that you’re wrong,” Luke says. Michael only stares, and Luke stands up from the floor, sighing softly. “What you know about us is wrong. What you know about them is wrong. You spent half a year locked in a cell. It’s still slow, but it’s coming back to life. War is, is what I’m saying. It’s not a good time to keep any secrets.”

“Six months?” Michael repeats, frowning, blinking slowly. “Are you saying I haven’t slept for six months?” he scoffs, mockingly, because it doesn’t make any sense. But Luke nods, and then he doesn’t have it in him to keep mocking. He just blinks and stares ahead at Luke, not knowing what to do with that information.

“Go get some sleep, alright?” Luke says, coming closer, and Michael doesn’t remember to flinch away from his touch, not even when he puts the blanket over his shoulder again. “Tomorrow I promise you you’ll get to shower. I’ll even unlock the bracelet, after, of course, locking the window and making sure to get rid of any sharp objects you may come to attack me with,” Luke laughs weakly, like he thinks that’s actually funny. Michael just lies down on his back, staring at the ceiling. Luke tucks him in, brings the sheets and blanket of the hotel up to his shoulders. As he moves away and stands there, watching his doing, he adds: “You know what, I’ll even give you time. You can even jerk off in the shower if you want!”

Michael stares at him, and he chuckles for the third time, only this time he looks away almost immediately, rolling his eyes. “Shut up,” he says, quietly.

Luke looks proud. “See? You’re blushing. That’s great. Means you’ll eventually not look ghostly pale anymore,” he says playfully, and Michael would very much like to argue, but then Luke goes and turns off the light of the room, and it’s just.

His body is not capable of resisting it anymore. 

He closes his eyes, and he lets sleep come for him.


	3. the kids are all wrong, the story's all off

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly i'm so!!!! (▰˘◡˘▰) i can't believe the support i'm getting with this. thank you so, so much. i'm already super obsessed with opia, sort of even [drew a little something](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/127509946105/so-i-drew-opiamuke-because-this-is-my-life-now-i), but don't judge me. 8) so anyway, thank you so much for the comments, here or on tumblr. you guys are totally badass. ♥

Karen smiles, her hand messing his hair in a way that makes him frown, offended, backing off, hips meeting the kitchen table in a sharp angle that makes him wince and makes her laugh. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head, and Michael chuckles, looking away and folding his arms. “I just got it bleached, Mum, don’t,” he says.

“It looks so funny red,” she says, but she’s letting it go, walking to the tall metal fridge. “Too bad your magick isn’t fire. It’d be something else,” she teases, laughing quietly.

Michael rolls his eyes in the same exaggerated way his mother does, walks around the table so he can take one of the chairs and throw on leg over it. If Karen was paying attention, she’d tell him to stop trying so hard to impress, be a good boy, be _mindful_ , which is what she always says when she means careful. But Michael’s no idiot. He knows it won’t make anyone raise any eyebrows if he adopts a bit of a bad boy image, especially if it’s to impress the right crowd. Dying his hair red, wearing leather jackets and combat boots, that has nothing to do with rolling your eyes in black. 

Which is not his thing, either. It only sort of half is. It’s not the same.

“Anyway,” he clears his throat, but Karen’s still looking at something in the fridge, entertained. “My birthday’s coming up. A boy never turns fifteen twice,” he smirks.

He hears something, in his heart and not his ears. It’s a change in the atmosphere. He can almost smell how Karen’s muscles stiffen, how she takes a deep breath and it takes her a moment to close the fridge door, turning to him with a look that doesn’t read good news. In her long white vest and bleached white hair pulled in a bun, Michael sometimes doesn’t recognize the woman who raised him. If he was asked, he’d say this job in the Council isn’t being good for her. But she never asks. Says she’s doing this for him, that Michael wouldn’t understand.

She’s right about the latter.

“We need to talk about that,” she says, sternly. 

Michael scoffs. “What’s there to talk about,” he says, instead of asking, because he knows when it comes to it, she’ll say instead of ask, too. 

The kitchen is relatively big, to a relatively big house that’s still the smallest of the neighborhood. But Karen says it’s worth to pay the price they did for the house, even though it isn’t as big as their neighbor’s, all for the location. Location is important, she keeps telling him, it’s all about where you are, more than who you’re with. Michael isn’t a big fan of the house, thinks it’s huge for just the two of them, how they keep missing each other when one’s in the living room and the other’s at the kitchen.

No maids, no gardeners, no pool cleaners. No matter how much Karen earns, still nobody else comes into this house. The rules were made crystal clear when they moved out of the village a few years ago. Nobody else could see what Michael could do. There’s only a part of everyone that the public should see, and for Michael, it’s only half of him.

“I know you’re excited, but we can’t do what you want,” Karen raises her eyebrows, turns to face him completely, goes as far as walking a couple of steps his way, but stops before she’s close enough that he could reach for her. Michael parts his lips, but he’s got no argument yet. She ends them before they arise: “It’s dangerous. Be reasonable. Be mindful.”

Fully aware of the whine in his voice, he says: “But, Mum! What if I only invite Calum? It’ll be only you and me and him. How does that sound?”

“Like you’re not listening to me,” she snorts. Michael frowns, and he tries talking again, but she interrupts him. “I’m glad you found yourself a friend. I am, Mikey. But the Hood family is known to be powerful Order witches. You don’t want to get too close.” 

“Mum,” Michael chuckles weakly, incredulous. “Calum is fourteen.”

Karen narrows her eyes, voice raising, heartbeat so loud that Michael hears them drum inside his head. “And his sister is a trained guard in the military, who’d shoot you in the head first time she gets, if she knew.”

They’re silent, then.

Michael pushes back the insistent magick in his heart that tells him he should pay attention to the details, listen to her heartbeat and how her heart pumps blood down and up her blood stream. There’s truth and there’s lie to that. There’s also fear, which her eyes also show. He doesn’t need Order magick to know that Karen is terrified.

He presses his lips together. 

Taking a deep breath, he asks: “Is that what you’re trying to stop? My best friend’s sister from killing me?” he snorts, mockingly, even though his eyes burn, even though he just wants to turn and run to his room, where she won’t hear it if he does give in and cry, just this once.

But Karen sighs, closing her eyes for a second. She walks to the table, too, sits across from him with her face in her hands. For a second, Michael thinks she may cry. Then he remembers who she is, and feels a little resentful of how she won’t, ever. 

“There are worse things than being killed,” she tells him, darkly, and then, breathing out heavily: “They don’t know you like I do, and they’ll never bother to. If they know about you, you’ll be a caged animal.”

Michael cocks an eyebrow. Feeling bold and hurt, he stands up. Forcing a smile, he spits: “So exactly as I am now.”

If only he knew.

* * *

Michael doesn’t remember if he ever dreamed when he was in the Order Prison. Maybe he did, even with his eyes open. He was out of it so often and he remembers so little, that he wouldn’t be surprised. But nothing like this, ever, this much he can tell. When he opens his eyes in the dark of room 93 somewhere a couple of hours away from downtown, he can still see Karen’s eyes, still feel the Order magick in his veins, in his soul, going freely as he noticed things even when he didn’t want to. No effort necessary, no eyes rolling back, no need to call the magick to him. It just came, all his.

He can still see it behind his eyelids when he closes his eyes again, and he wants to cry, wants to cry until there’s no more tears in him left. But it’s not only because he misses her, and how sorry he is that he never understood her when she only meant well. It’s because his wrists hurt when he pulls them apart and the handcuffs keep restraining him. It’s because even though he’s all wrapped in Luke’s blanket under the motel blankets on top of him, he still feels cold. It’s because he’s dirty and disgusting, and when he opens his eyes again, he can see the outline of Luke’s back as he sits cross-legged opposite from Michael, looking out the high window to the nothingness.

Michael stops himself from sighing. He doesn’t want to show that he’s awake.

Out the window, he sees nothing but the moon, playing hide and seek with the dark heavy clouds. It looks like it’s going to rain. Michael remembers only glancing at the moon and getting bored within the first few seconds. Now he feels like he could watch it for hours. He’s missed nature, what it feels like to stand under the moon and feel your fingertips tingling with getting bathed in new energy. That makes him want to cry, too.

But as Luke was probably not held hostage for the past six months, Michael doesn’t know what’s so interesting to him about it, staring at the moon instead of sleeping. It’s so dark that it doesn’t add up, either. It was close to sunset when they parked in the motel. He can’t have slept for a full day.

Luke sighs softly, then throws his body back heavily. Michael closes his eyes at first, then realizes Luke probably won’t remember to look at him, especially if he’s been unmoving for the past day. He opens his eyes again, sees the shape of Luke lying on his back on the bed, how he crosses his long legs against the wall. He’s not wearing those skin-tight jeans anymore, but sweatpants. Clean clothes. God, Michael envies him.

He also can’t decide whether to believe his story.

Then something incredible happens. A light comes to life when Luke touches the metal on his lip. It turns to neon purple, then green, and Luke giggles to himself, amused, while all Michael can do is stare, wide-eyed and holding his breath. With another touch, Luke’s index finger slides against the metal and pulls it with a soft tug. The piercing becomes a straight arrow the size of a finger, still shining in neon colors that keep changing, and it stays parallel to Luke’s finger, following it.

Luke points up, and in the dark, it’s the only thing that has any light and color. His hands have shadows the color of the rainbow as he moves them around the straight arrow, and the straight arrow isn’t straight anymore, curling and curling in the air, as Luke decides to, making it go way up, so high it almost touches the ceiling, and down enough that it can almost illuminate his face. It’s beautiful.

Michael never knew Chaos magick could be beautiful.

His heart speeds up to the show on the bed on the other side of the room. Even though he’s held back tears with the memory of Karen and of being fifteen, held back tears with the pain and the cold and the feeling of abandonment, watching Luke’s tricks with his lip ring makes his eyes well up. He presses his lips together so he won’t make a noise, but it’s too touching, and when the first tear rolls down his cheek, he has to shut his eyes closed.

As if Luke senses something, he clears his throat quietly: “Michael?” 

But that can’t be, because witches only have one magick. Except if you’re half-something and half-something else. Then you’re presented with two, one of each. One bad, one good. Michael’s too afraid to try to assess any of his.

For a second, he entertains the idea of pretending like he doesn’t hear it, like he’s too far gone in his sleep, gain some time so he can think of some escape route. But it’s useless. He’s painfully aware of how useless anything would be at this point. If everyone’s the bad guys, then where are the good guys?

He sniffs, burying his face against the pillow to pretend like that tear never happened.

“Yeah,” he says.

Luke’s quiet, too, like now that he’s confirmed that Michael’s up, he doesn’t know what to do about it, either. But the lip ring stops glowing in neon, and it isn’t an arrow at all anymore. It falls to his palm when there’s still a faint light to it, and then he’s putting it back in the dark, and Michael can’t see anything. 

“How are you… feeling?” 

The question comes hushed, and Michael doesn’t know whether to appreciate it or hate it. Part of him is glad for the quietness, his head still making everything echo twice as loud before it registers, part of him just mad at being kept away from the only person that still matters anything to him, being driven right to the arms of someone who’ll do the unthinkable. 

“I’m dirty, like I said yesterday,” he says, matter-of-factly.

Luke chuckles. 

He takes a deep breath, turning on his back so he can stare at the ceiling and not at Luke’s shape in the other bed. “What’s so funny?”

“That was three days ago,” Luke laughs quietly, and Michael blinks a couple of times, but decides against arguing. Even if it’s true, it makes no difference. “Halsey isn’t happy with staying in the motel. I think Geordie doesn’t care because she’ll be getting paid for the days, but Halsey was… pissed. That you wouldn’t wake up, that is. But that’s fine. You slept for three days. When she was kept in the Order prison for half the time you were, she slept for a full week. So she gets it, even if she hates it.”

Michael’s head hurts. Just trying to make some sense out of this hurts.

He sighs. “I don’t even know where to start asking the questions.”

Luke chuckles again, and Michael hears the mattress shifting on the other side of the room, but he doesn’t look. “Do you want to take that shower? I won’t wake them up now. It’ll be morning in like an hour or two. We’ll have to wait until it’s dark again anyway.”

“Why,” he murmurs, quietly, not sure it sounds like a question at all.

But Luke hears. He answers, simply: “It’s just the Order vultures, you know. They can find us, but only in daylight. They’re blind as fuck when the nighttime comes, and that’s when we move.” Michael can actually hear the smile in his voice.

Michael sighs tiredly. “Of course there are vultures now.”

“So, shower?” he asks.

Searching for Luke in the dark for a few seconds, he feels panic rising at the possibility that he somehow left. Then he realizes why he hasn’t found him is that he’s in the bathroom. Michael’s shoulders relax, and he waits, looking at the open door to the bathroom, and listening to the soft clicking noises of Luke working his magick with the windows and any of said sharp objects Michael could find to use against him. Michael’s still going to look for them, he thinks.

He wouldn’t kill Luke or anything. Just make it so he could run. Preferably at night, then, whatever those vultures that Luke talked about are.

Then he turns the light of the bathroom on, and the light hurts his eyes at first. Michael shuts his eyes, and when he opens them, Luke’s already standing in front of him, with a silly smile, on an oversized jumper and sweatpants. 

He’s only glad that Luke’s body blocks the light coming from the bathroom.

Squinting his eyes, he states: “I don’t have any clean clothes.”

“No shit,” Luke raises his eyebrows, still smiling. Michael stares, waiting, and Luke blinks a couple of times: “I thought it was obvious? You’re taking my clothes. I have a whole backpack full of them. It’s fine,” he shrugs. “We’re probably the same size.”

If on the one hand he doesn’t want to wear the clothes of any Chaos witch, on the other he doesn’t really have any choice. He takes a deep breath, and decides not to grunt when Luke helps him sit, and then pulls the blanket from around his shoulders first. That’s when Michael draws the line, murmuring negatives that probably don’t sound all that coherent, until Luke stops, still holding the blanket between his hands.

“What is it?”

“The blanket. It’s mine.”

Luke tilts his head to the side. “No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is,” Michael says, matter-of-factly, staring at him, challenging him to say it isn’t one more time. And for some reason, Luke decides it’s not worth it, just nods slowly and with a frown, and puts it back on Michael’s bed. 

He’s still tired, but not in the same way that he was before. There’s less drowsiness and numbness, more of just not remembering how to put one foot in front of the other. All of his muscles are sore, feels like he hasn’t used them in months, which in a way is true. When he stands up, a jolt of pain goes up his spine, but he only winces in response. He refuses to take one look down his body, knows it won’t be any good, so instead he just raises his wrists tied together with the bracelet, waiting for Luke to do what he’d promised.

Michael had sort of expected a complaint at least, but Luke’s hands raise to touch Michael’s wrists, his thumb tracing the deep cut of the chains from the Order Prison, and it’s ghostly enough that it doesn’t hurt, but it still makes Michael frown and stare at it, how his thumb takes a moment against Michael’s skin before it touches the bracelet. Following its orders, the bracelet starts unwrapping from only one of Michael’s hands.

Remembering to look up, he meets Luke’s eyes, all black and unblinking.

It makes him hold his breath and set his jaw, feeling his hands shake just a tiny little bit.

Luke blinks his eyes back, and smiles quietly at Michael. 

Looking down at his wrists again, he’s almost afraid to move them. Luke takes a few steps away, and Michael opens and closes his fists, getting used to the movement in his hands and wrists again. The bracelet by itself doesn’t make his wrist hurt, just when it’s changed into a handcuff. It feels so good to have this small freedom that he almost wants to giggle, thank Luke, then he remembers that without him he would also have his magick, and all his willingness to smile is washed away.

He takes a deep breath, and looks at Luke again.

Luke looks nervous. Michael doesn’t know why.

“You said you could lend me some clothes,” he starts, then clears his throat loudly, awkwardly, still not used to using his voice, either. Luke nods and takes a neat pile from the end of his bed, that he organized probably before Michael noticed his absence before. “Um,” he says instead of thank you, taking the pile into his hands. 

“Take your time,” Luke says, because there isn’t anything else to say.

And because Michael isn’t a fan of saying things just for saying, he leaves him without another word, closing the door to the bathroom so he has this small privacy and small world just for himself. He sets the clothes on top of a little bench next to the sink, and staring at the mirror just above it, he swears under his breath, and chuckles lowly.

He looks like shit.

Before he was arrested, his hair was a dark purple that made him look older. Now the color’s faded to violet, at best, and in parts of his hair it’s faded to the point of going back to the white-ish tone bleached hair gets when it’s been too long. His roots are growing back, too, dark blond. His hair is also dirty, oily, terrible. His face is covered in cuts he doesn’t remember, and tracing his fingers over his own face, he notices they were healed long ago, and now there’s only the dried blood to tell him there was a cut there once. As he strips out of his clothes, he keeps finding wounds he never took notice that are not there anymore, or on departure mood. 

It’s his body, and he doesn’t know what happened with it the last few months.

Naked, he stares to the clothes pooled in front of the sink. Michael wants to burn them, so there’s no physical proof of his stay with the Order, no other than the scars he’ll carry around his wrists. Michael’s heart speeds up with the thrill of burning them, but that’s a destructive route, and he needs to keep away from those.

Or not. At this point, whichever way he goes it’s no good.

Turning away, he walks into the shower, and when he turns on the water, it doesn’t even matter that at first it’s cold. It’s so cold that he feels shivers up and down his spine, the hairs on the back of his neck rising, his hands shaking a little bit. But it’s worth it, how he can close his eyes, one hand still in the register, tilting his head up so the cold water meets his face, washes away all the dirt in him. 

Gradually, he feels the water turning a little warmer, and that’s when he reaches for the soap, and starts cleaning himself. He can barely keep his eyes open, and he keeps fighting back tears as he slides the soap up his arms, over his shoulders, down his neck. He’s fought them for so long, and now the smallest things are setting him off.

Neon magick in the dark. Soap that smells good and running water.

He stares down at his feet next to the rail, at the dark red dried blood licking down his legs, and then he runs his hands over his head, the bracelet with the white gems unaffected by the water. Right now, Michael doesn’t even care about it. What good would magick do now? There’s no need for reading people or changing the shapes of things right now.

All the escape he could hope for is this water, this cleansing, the blessing that comes with massaging sore muscles and telling himself that no matter what, he got out alive, and he’ll do whatever it takes to stay that way. Alive.

He doesn’t know how long he stays under the shower. At some point something clicks and the water turns shockingly cold, but he’s still washing his hair with the soap, and he doesn’t turn it off for another ten or twenty minutes. 

The towel is rough against his skin, but it feels almost like caressing when compared to the abuse it’s suffered from knives and magick over the past months. Luke’s clothes aren’t too bad, either, a pair of shorts, a T-shirt with a beer logo in it, and a jumper that looks as big as the one Luke has on right now, on the other side of that door, doing whatever it is that he does when he’s not kidnapping people from prisons.

He stares at himself in the mirror again.

He’s got a black eye he doesn’t remember getting, and his hair color is all wrong, looking like the whole galaxy instead of purple, but it’s clean, now. He’s still damaged, but he’s clean. He feels fresh and better, stronger, even if his muscles still hurt and he’s a little bit sleepy still, and now hunger’s striking, too.

Taking a deep breath, he sinks his teeth in his bottom lip, looking around. He wonders if it’s even worth it, going through the trouble of finding something to fight Luke with. But Luke’s probably already searched the bathroom for something that could be used against him, so Michael decides against looking, and opens the bathroom into the bedroom.

The light of the room is on, and both their beds are made. Luke’s sitting cross-legged on his bed with a briefcase open in front of him, and his goggles up his head. He’s frowning at something and both his hands are inside the briefcase, busy with something Michael can’t see. When his eyes land on Michael, the frown leaves, and he asks: “Feeling any better?”

He sounds so genuine, that Michael has to remind himself this is the enemy.

One of them, anyway. Lots of enemies, these days. Hard to keep track.

“I’m hungry,” he says, cautiously, still standing more in the bathroom than in the bedroom. He’s having second thoughts. Should’ve stayed in a little bit more, enjoyed his pitiful bit of freedom before Luke’s tying his hands back together and he can’t even move right. It makes him angry that he didn’t think this through.

“You look a lot better,” Luke offers with a small shrug. “As for food, I can go get something from the machines outside, but I’m afraid it’s all junk food.”

Michael blinks a couple of times, not sure what to make of that.

Luke goes on: “Will you somehow manage to run away if I keep the window open? I really wanted to see the dawn because I kind of love it,” he rolls his eyes, as if that’s embarrassing. Not all that he’s already done to Michael, from fooling him to kidnapping him to borrowing clothes. Liking to see the daw. That’s what makes him blush a bit and look away abruptly. “Ah, since you liked the blanket, I put it there, too,” he points at Michael’s bed. The blanket is folded and just next to his pillow. 

Frowning, he snorts. Then he takes advantage of how he’ll probably not have his hands free for much longer, and crosses his arms over his chest. “Why are you doing this?” 

Closing the briefcase and moving it away, Luke gives him a long confused look. “What do you mean?”

First he rolls his eyes, because it’s ridiculous, and because Luke must know. Then he slams the door of the bathroom closed, because it’s been a while since he’s got to show his age. Then he sighs heavily, walks to the middle of the rom, arms spread as if he’s this close to just punching Luke. And maybe he should. Maybe that’s his shot, and he’s wasting it on pointless arguing.

“What is your fucking angle in this?! Why let me keep your blanket and defend me against the blond girl, and show me your scars and tell me about your brothers and your family?! Why not just fucking chain me to the sink and leave me there until you can be back on the road to take me to Daryl?”

By the end of his little speech, the bravado has faded considerably. There’s more rawness than Michael would care to explain the origins of. So instead he just frowns, staring at Luke, waiting for an answer that could calm his demons for the time-being.

Luke’s eyes on him are so strange. It messes him up, makes him go from breathing hard to holding his breath, eyes narrowed and staring at Luke in almost contempt as Luke opens and closes his mouth once, twice. He closes his eyes for a second, too, shaking his head, looking away. 

He looks broken.

Luke’s hands reach for the goggles on top of his head, take it off completely so he can set it on top of the closed briefcase. He looks so uncomfortable, so out of his element. For a second there, Michael’s got the upper hand, could do just what Luke asked him about. Punch him or something, take this moment of distress, and then just do what he’s just said: run out the window. He could have his freedom, even in the middle of nowhere. Maybe people wouldn’t know who he is, wouldn’t know he’s a stray dog, a runaway with no shoes, and he could try to find Karen and make some sense out of all of this.

But he doesn’t. He just doesn’t.

He stands in the middle of the bedroom with his arms folded, waiting for an answer.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Luke says, quiet and out of character, no hint of smile on his mouth, no hint of sparkle in his eyes. 

Snorting, Michael feels that he’s owed it when he says: “Try me.”

It takes Luke another minute, frowning and staring down at the mattress underneath him before he points at Michael’s bed, says, “Sit,” and Michael goes and does just as told. He tells himself it’s not much, giving in to that one command, but his heart’s drumming fast and loud in his chest and he’s afraid without knowing what is it that he’s so afraid of. “It’s just that, like, it’s different for me?” he frowns, looking at him, like he hopes that this alone will do.

It won’t. Michael keeps on staring, facial expression unchanging.

Luke scratches the back of his head, sighing. “How much do you know about The Trinity?”

Searching his head for the words is useless. All he can think of are Christian references that he’s learned about in school, and he wouldn’t take Luke for the religious type. So he just shakes his head no, a little ashamed, and he sees that tiniest bit of mischief returning to Luke’s eyes as he raises his eyebrows mockingly, saying:

“Those guys at the Order don’t tell their witches any shit, do they?”

Unimpressed, he keeps on staring, so Luke breathes out heavily, and raises his shoulders in a shrug. “Alright,” he starts. “So The Trinity are three oracles who work as one. As the name probably gives it away, they can predict the future. They’ve never made a single mistake, so they’re obviously a big deal,” Luke rolls his eyes, gesturing dismissively.

The concept of three old ladies seeing the future like in the old tales is appalling. Too mythic to be even remotely close to reality. But looking at Luke, even with his magick inhibited, he can tell he’s not lying. Maybe it’s just the lie that’s been passed on to him, and he believes it because he’s never known any better. Michael rolls with it, nodding slowly and not breaking eye-contact.

“Are they Chaos witches?”

Luke cocks an eyebrow. “Are you paying any attention at all, Mikey? They’re not witches. They’re oracles. They’re not at all what you and me are.”

Michael feels his eyebrows knitting closer together, as he shakes his head vehemently, while Luke’s still talking. When he stops, he looks at him again, eyebrows going high, arms still crossed tightly against his chest. “1. Don’t call me Mikey, 2. It’s you and I, 3. We’re not the same at all.”

Luke sighs softly, looking at him, expression blank for a second, before he seems to decide to ignore him. “Anyway,” he says the first syllable louder, almost comically, and then resumes talking normally. “The Order has the Trinity, of course, so the Chaos doesn’t know everything. But we do know a thing or two about their predictions, or at least the most important ones anyway. The Trinity predicted that the Order would eventually find Daryl’s son,” Luke points at him, with a half-smile. “And that they’d take him prisoner for half a year,” he makes the smallest of pauses, and Michael doesn’t have any time to think of something to say then, because Luke’s immediately adding: “I just think it’s kind of fucked up, you know? All they did to you. All they do to everyone. But with you, everyone knew it was coming. Everyone knew because The Trinity said so, and there’s no stopping it once they decide something is going to happen. And hey, it’s not your fault that you’re Daryl’s son, any more than it is that you’re Karen’s. So I won’t treat you like shit just because it was your destiny to be hunted, you know? You got that enough already anyway,” Luke shrugs. “So can I leave the window open, or not?”

A moment passes in which Michael just looks at him, absolutely speechless.

Then he tries: “If I say yes, what stops me from lying?”

Luke frowns. “Why _would_ you lie, if I’ve only said the truth to you?” And then he laughs weakly, shaking his head, like Michael must be a little off to even suggest something like it. Michael doesn’t think it’s fake, the naiveté that doesn’t match the body count he’s left behind him. It makes him blink a couple of times, staring at him.

“You can leave the window open if you want,” Michael finds himself saying, quietly.

Luke smiles big, and suddenly he’s turning away from Michael, walking on his knees on his bed until he’s closest to the window, and then sitting on his legs to watch it, even though there’s nothing to watch yet, and the sky’s still dark. Michael looks at him for a few seconds, before his stomach growls, and then Luke looks over his shoulder, with a frown, murmuring something Michael can’t hear, and then he’s on his feet, barefoot and out of the room, out to get Michael food.

It’s so obvious Michael’s convinced there’s a catch. He’s stares at the open window and the clouds outside, can smell the rain in the air when it’s a couple of hours away. He sits back on the bed, takes the blanket and wraps it around himself again, like a cape. Luke’s apparently forgotten about his bracelet, and the window’s inviting him, like a portal to another world.

He wonders if there’s more to Luke’s magick than he’s let on. If Daryl trusts him, then maybe there’s something else. Maybe he can enchant the weak pane of the window to wrap around Michael’s neck and choke him if he tries to leave. Maybe something worse. Maybe there are ferocious dogs outside. Maybe he’ll die if he crosses the line.

Holding his breath as he stands up, he keeps the blanket closely around him. It sort of smells like someone else, even though he’s spent the night in it, and he thinks it’s annoying, how even though he was sweaty and dirty, his smell was only in the sheets, and the blanket still smells like Luke. But he pushes the unwanted thought aside, eyes set on the open window and the chilly wind coming from outside, and rests one of his bare knees against the quilt over the bed. 

His teeth sink on his bottom lip as he grabs the blanket closer still, properly kneeling, going all the way to the window. One of his hands is still grabbing at the blanket, the other touches the window pane carefully, his fingers shaking. 

His heart might burst.

Michael hears the door open, then close again. He freezes, his heart a lump in his throat.

He doesn’t dare move.

Then the mattress underneath him shifts with new weight, and when he looks over his shoulder, and Luke’s sitting cross-legged on the other side of the bed, four or five packets of chips and two cans of soda on the bed between them. Michael looks at him, eyebrows raised, but Luke just points at the food between them quietly. 

Michael sits back on his legs, heart still pounding madly, and opens his can of soda, taking a sip. It burns his throat, but the bad feeling is immediately replaced by something else. He’s staring down, feeling like Luke’s silence is somehow proof that he’s let Luke down by getting close to the window, and now all his possible privileges will be cut short, and he’ll lose everything he never properly had.

“I like the dawn because it’s a constant reminder that something new is coming,” Luke says, quietly, and when Michael looks, he sees the Chaos witch looking out the window, taking a sip of his own soda. “Every single day, something new is coming.” 

He feels his mouth shaping into a smile, quiet and genuine, and then he follows Luke’s eyes, to outside the window, not to freedom but to the sky. 

“You do know that everything’s always the same, right? Days come and go, and it doesn’t matter what the sun tells you. It’s still all the same.”

Luke chuckles, like he thinks Michael’s the naive one. “It’s all a matter of perspective,” Luke explains, “for example,” he pauses, turning to look at Michael. Michael looks at him, too, as he reaches for a packet of chips and opens it. Even the strong industrialized smell is enough to make his mouth water. “Would you really say there’s no difference between yesterday and today?”

“Yesterday I was asleep. It’s not a fair comparison,” Michael shrugs, but that quiet smile is still on his lips. It goes away eventually, but not for long. 

Soon Luke’s smirking with raised eyebrows, saying: “I’ll tell you about mine, then. Yesterday I thought I was going to be killed really, really soon. Today, I have a roommate,” Luke smiles. 

Michael doesn’t ask about the yesterday part. He’s got a feeling it’ll come up eventually.

Instead he snorts, shakes his head, and after he’s swallowed the first of food his mouth’s seen in months, he says: “I’m keeping your blanket.”

Luke just sighs, breaking eye-contact again to look out the window. 

“Yeah, I know.”


	4. swallow your fears, become them eventually

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAAAAAAAAAA I AM SO FUCKING EXCITED TO SHARE THIS CHAPTER WITH YOU!!!! and i cannot /believe/ the comments fmdsklfskgm THANK YOU. thank you so much. i'm so :') !!!! i want to reply to all of them, and i think i'll do so later this week. pls don't feel discouraged to send them because i can't seem to make any reasonable free time for replying to your beautiful words. i love and appreciate every comment so much!!!!! (▰˘◡˘▰) i've just been a tiny bit busy, but i wanted to post the update already. I HOPE YOU LIKE IT!!! happy reading!~

Michael’s eleven when his world stops making sense for the first time. He’s always known there was something off about him, about the way he could connect his magick so effortlessly, while all the other kids at school in the village were struggling and rolling their eyes back in white to get what Michael could with plain gestures of his hands, sometimes not even that much.

He’d just figured he was smarter than average. He was proud of himself.

Karen told him he was smarter than average. Karen told him to be proud.

And then he isn’t anymore. Then he standing in his kitchen with his eyes wide and Karen standing on the other side with a blank expression, and his fingers are spread so much that between his fingers he can feel the skin tear, just a tiny bit of blood that doesn’t hurt so much as it scares him. Between them, is what once was their table. Somehow, it’s blown to pieces.

Michael had exploded his kitchen table. The stake-like pieces of wood are still going down, and his hands start shaking, his heart speeding up. His bottom lip quivers, and he murmurs, “I’m so sorry,” but it doesn’t seem like enough, because Karen won’t say a word, won’t even flinch, and he starts sobbing, shoulders shaking with how hard he’s trying to keep still, and he finally lowers his hands, feeling blood licking his fingers down, thick and slow, until the first droplets fall to the floor.

He’s a tall boy for his age, but Karen’s still much taller, makes him feel small with her silence and her disapproving eyes. It’s the first sort of reaction he gets, and he’s so afraid of the blood in his hands, of the stakes falling with almost no sound. It stops altogether, and he’s still shaking.

“Michael,” she starts, sounding tired, the shock wearing off.

Michael’s sobbing too much to speak. His whole upper body shakes, and he can’t make himself blink. The tears are too much, the sobs make him choke. When he finally makes himself talk, he says: “Mum, I didn’t mean that,” he whines, and shuts his eyes, arms wrapping around himself, bracing himself for the worst. “It was an accident, I don’t-- I don’t even know how I did that, I.”

His sobs stop him again. He’s shaking so hard, staining the sleeves of his T-shirt with blood. It’s not so much blood, but it’s the most blood he’s ever seen in his life, and it’s his. 

“I’m aware,” she says, sighing, and finally crosses the space between them, avoiding the biggest pieces of wood on the floor. She stops just before him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s time you know, anyway. It’s time you know about your origins.”

Michael sinks his teeth on his bottom lip so it stops shaking. His whole body still shakes, and he has to set his jaw so he looks better. He blinks a couple of times, staring up at Karen. She puts a stray of hair behind her ear, breathing out heavily, and with her arm going around his shoulders, she takes him to the couch on the other side of the room. Michael goes, shaking and quiet and feeling like he must be in trouble. 

He’s never seen anything like it, either. He’s never seen anyone blow up anything.

It’d been so innocent. He’d closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened, the world wasn’t like it usually is anymore. It was all black and full of void, except for the things around him. He could feel everything. He could see with the eyes of his soul Karen’s blue vibrant energy, and the dead molecules of the table between them, vibrating quietly and in a loop, not by their own will, but just because. It was so beautiful, opaque white, making the smallest of sounds if he really paid attention. He smiled, taking a deep breath, mesmerized by what it looked like. Then he raised his hands, and felt the energy in the air change, like it could be shaped to his own desire. Connecting the table to his hands was easy enough. Pulling his hands apart was the only logical step.

He didn’t know what it meant. He never meant for anything bad to happen. 

He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the look in Karen’s eyes when she turned, just in time to see the table explode and go up. She looked right past that, as if she’d seen much worse magick, and right to Michael. She could tell, right then, what Michael couldn’t: that he was doomed. 

“Sit, dear,” she says, pointing at the seat next to the one she takes.

Michael does, head between his shoulders, staring down at his shoes and sniffing. 

“John Gordon was my husband,” she starts, looking at him, “but not your father.” 

She pauses, as if to make sure he’s following. He isn’t. He’s got his eyes suddenly narrowed, heartbeat speeding up as the world stops making sense a second time within minutes. The way Karen looks at him, like he’s an adult, is disturbing. But he supposes, later on and going through that conversation in his head countless times as he grows older, more lost, and more bitter, that the second his Chaos magick showed, was the second his childhood died. It wasn’t murder by Karen’s hands, but by his own half-chaotic heart.

“John was a good man, in letting you have his name, Michael. We owe him our lives. They would’ve killed me if they knew I was carrying you,” she says, snorting at the end of the sentence, where it rises to show her contempt. 

Michael blinks away his tears, holding his breath. “I don’t get it. Why would anyone want to kill you, Mum?”

“Because,” she raises her eyebrows, “I was pregnant with you, and there was never anyone like you before. No one who was only half-good. No one with the potential to be half-bad.”

* * *

“Michael. Michael. Michael.”

Each time his name is called, it’s punctuated by insistent poking on his ribcage. At first, Michael’s taken somewhere else, like he’s waking up in his bed and it’s Karen, telling him he’s late for school, and she won’t give him a ride, even if he’s late. Worst case scenario, he fell asleep in class and it’s the English teacher with eyebrows arched up in a way that makes her look perpetually surprised, scowling at him for sleeping in her class again. 

But that couldn’t be the case, because he’s safely wrapped around a blanket, and that never happens in class. Michael hears his name be called again, more urgently than before, and that’s when it sinks. The blanket. The voice. The urgency.

As soon as he snaps his eyes open in shock and meets the blueness of Luke’s, the way he’s frowning and his cheeks are a little red, like he’s out of breath, Michael’s sure the Order has found them. It’s a deja vu backwards, and he wants to say: deja entendu. But he doesn’t. He feels his heart speed up and he blinks a couple of times more, looking around the room. 

It still looks peaceful, but Luke doesn’t.

“What, what, what,” he says, one for each time he was called.

The window next to Luke’s bed is still open. It’s daylight, but it’s raining. Michael has no idea what time it is, with how heavy the clouds are, making the sun just a background dancer to the thunders scarring the sky and then disappearing.

“Wrists. Please.”

It takes some seconds for the meaning attached to the words to come to him. Last night, when they watched the sunset without exchanging many words, as Michael ate more than half of all the food Luke’s brought to their room, he’d just figured Luke had forgotten. Eventually, not long before the sun came up, he felt too tired, and with a murmur that he can’t remember what was meant to mean, he fell back to his own bed, hands carrying the blanket to make sure it never fell off his shoulders, and the freedom of mobility didn’t even occur to him. He supposes he’s the one who forgot.

He’s still a prisoner, though. Prisoners don’t get many choices.

Rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands, he pulls himself up to sit and yawn, but Luke’s running out of time. He gives Michael an impatient look, atypical seriousness making him look older, and effortlessly, he blinks, and his eyes are full black. It takes maybe a total of five seconds, for him to trace his cold finger around Michael’s wrist, and the bracelet to expand and imprison both his wrists together. Then he blinks away the darkness. His hand, cold and with fingers that feel like needles against Michael’s warm skin, goes to Michael’s shoulder, making him look up.

“I need you to pretend that you’re asleep now.”

Michael frowns, asks: “Why?”

But Luke walks away from him, giving him no answer, and hurries to the door. As if on cue, someone slams their fist against it a couple of times more. Luke shuts his eyes for a second, adjusts the goggles on top of his head, and then takes a deep breath.

Their eyes connect for a second.

And then Michael closes his eyes, lying his head on top of the pillow again, his handcuffed wrists to the side of the bed a little awkwardly, making his arm ache. He takes one deep breath to try to relax the muscles on his face, and tells himself he’s gone, and isn’t a complete idiot for giving his kidnapper what he needs.

First it’s the sound of the door cracking open, then footsteps in.

“I was naked, by the way,” Luke says, voice carried with both malice and something else. Something unfriendly. He hadn’t heard him talk like that before, he thinks, and he tries to consider what are the odds, considering he’s the one who should be under threats. 

“With that thing here?” he hears someone ask. Geordie’s voice. 

She kicks Michael’s bed for good measure. Michael fights the urge to frown, trying to keep his face as peaceful as he’ll fool anyone into thinking he could be.

Luke snorts, and someone drops on the next bed. Michael supposes it’s him. Then comes Halsey’s voice, saying: “It’s the fourth day, Luke. We’re still fifteen or so hours away. Traveling at night, that’s two days of road.” Her tone is different than Geordie’s, like although she doesn’t care for Michael, maybe she does a little for Luke. It’s a little softer, even if worried. Michael recognizes the difference. 

He’s ready to pull back, to connect with his magick, try and find out more about intentions and heartbeats, but then he remembers the damn bracelet, inhibiting his magick, and his shoulders fall back as he sighs in frustration. Then he sort of wants to kick himself because he’s sighed, but nobody seems to have noticed.

“And how is that my problem?” Luke scoffs. “Halz, I know. I want to be back as much as you do. But what am I supposed to do? Shake him by the shoulders until he opens his eyes?”

“Not a bad idea,” Geordie breathes out heavily, and Michael feels the mattress of his bed shifting, as she no doubt sits on his bed. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it. About the boy, I mean.”

After clearing his throat, Luke says, tone all concerned: “But, Geordie,” and then pauses a little. Michael imagines the frown on his face, the raised eyebrows. “You are not paid to think at all.”

“Luke,” Halsey starts, her tone warningly, and then something must happen, because Luke chuckles lowly, and Geordie sighs again. “Anyway, all I’m saying is that we need to get moving,” she pauses, too, and her tone is different when she says: “I talked to Dylan yesterday.”

It takes them all a moment to react to that. Michael doesn’t think either Geordie or Luke had heard about that before. It’s maybe why Halsey takes her time, starting and then starting over a few times before she, too, clears her throat, but she sounds like almost someone else when she speaks next.

“It’s not pretty. The Trinity predicted something new, and Ashton was one of the guards with them when it happened. The Order is quarantining all five guards who were present. On top of that, Dylan’s cover is almost blown. They know there’s someone there working with us. They just haven’t figured out who that is yet, and it won’t be long until they figure it out. And if they know about Dylan, they’ll know about Ashton.”

“Halsey, it won’t matter that they know about Ashton if Ashton’s dead,” Luke says, scoffing. He sounds maniac all of sudden, laughing quietly but surely, like he’s close to killing someone. Exactly how he was like when he broke Michael out of prison. 

“Why are they being kept in a quarantine? Are The Trinity contagious or some shit?” Geordie asks, shifting her weight on the other side of Michael’s bed. 

“No, it’s not that,” Halsey explains, patient and careful. “When you’re guarding The Trinity, you’re not supposed to experience anything. You’re supposed to just make sure they never leave. If it happens that you do see something, the Council has to figure out if they can trust you, and move you up, or if they kill you.”

“Just like that!” Luke giggles. Halsey sighs heavily, starts saying his name, but Luke interrupts her. “No, you won’t tell me to calm down. They’re going to kill Ashton, and when they kill him, they’re going to figure out about Dylan, and kill him, too. We need to break them out of there.”

“We can’t. We have a mission,” Geordie says, and then Michael can feel it, her hand pointing at him. He’s their mission. He’s what’s stopping them to go get their friends.

“ _We are going_ ,” Luke says, standing up suddenly. Michael feels the handcuffs around his wrists tighten. He feels his bed shift. It’s like every metal thing in the room shakes and changes because of the state he’s in. Michael shuts his eyes and tells himself he can’t react, can’t be himself, can’t even wrap the blanket tighter around him, because his hands are tied.

“We can’t leave Daryl’s son here,” Halsey starts, but it sounds like there could be an alternative. She takes a deep breath, then: “Maybe Geordie and I could go? You could stay with the boy.”

“I’m not-- Listen,” Luke stops himself, laughing again. “I am going. We’ll just have to take Michael. I’ll talk to him. I’ll explain how important it is for us, for me. We can’t let the Order kill them. Not Ashton and Dylan. Not after everything,” he says, the last few words shaken.

Geordie sighs. “You’re missing the point. He’s a prisoner. If we say go, he goes. It’s not about convincing him. It’s about getting Daryl’s son killed in a possible suicide mission. Now, I’m not the problem here. I’d be willing. I care about them. But taking the kid would not be a smart move at all.” Then, after a pause, more definitive and sure of herself: “It’s a no, Luke. We’re not going back for them.”

They’re quiet for a moment, all three of them; four including Michael, who won’t say a word anyway, pretending to be asleep, pretending to be dead already.

“How many days for them to decide on Ashton?” he asks, lowly.

“A couple,” Halsey shrugs. “Two or three. You know a quarantine is never a quarantine. But Dylan may be discovered first. Though, if he is, he’ll contact us first thing, because we’re the closest ones who could help. Hypothetically speaking.”

Luke sighs heavily.

Geordie stands up from Michael’s bed. 

“Halz, can we go for a walk?”

Halsey must say yes, because next thing Michael knows, there are footsteps and then the door opening and closing again, and Luke’s voice sounding heavy and a million times older when he says: “They’re gone now. You can open your eyes.”

* * *

They move out of the village because it’s too risky. Not enough people, everybody knows their names. Karen and Michael Gordon are moving to the city before Michael turns twelve. They can’t move right away, Karen says she needs to pull some strings first, but before he knows, he’s saying goodbye to everyone he’s ever known, and moving to the big city, where nobody cares to learn his name, and nobody knows about the one time where he blew up his kitchen table.

Karen and Michael don’t talk about it, either.

Once, taking the train, he had his palms spread against the glass of the door, holding his breath as he watched the Christmas lights for the first time. It made him want to cry without really knowing why. When he turned to Karen, she gave him one of these looks, and he just knew what she was thinking about.

He quickly averted her gaze, murmured: “I really am sorry. I’m never going to do that again.”

But she sighed, messed his hair lovingly. Shook her head and then pressed her lips to the top of his head. “You will, baby. You will.”

* * *

Michael blinks a couple of times, eyes open but body still unmoving, like Halsey and Geordie might come back at any second, and then Luke will be in trouble for making Michael pretend. He doesn’t know why he cares, tells himself he doesn’t, and looks at him quietly, across the room.

Luke’s got his eyes closed and his forehead pressed against the wall. 

Biting his bottom lip, he looks away, doesn’t mean to be staring. He lies on his back, with his chained wrists on his chest, and counts the stains in the ceiling, dark and ugly, somehow coffee stains in the ceiling. He wonders if it was someone like Halsey, with magick like telekinesis, throwing coffee around just to spite whoever was here before, whoever will be here after.

The only thing he’d do to spite history would be burn his clothes that are still in the bathroom.

Complicated times call for the simplest wishes.

“Do you want to talk?” he finds himself asking, quiet and careful.

At first there’s no reaction at all, like he’s spoken into the void and the void laughed at him for even trying. Then Luke opens his eyes, turns to him, like a wild cat about to run away. Then he snorts, sighs in frustration, says: “Why should I? You don’t care.”

“To be fair, it’s not about me,” Michael offers, shrugging, staring intently at the ceiling, its stains, and all the broken people that were there before. “If you want to talk you can talk. Just pretend I’m someone else if it helps.”

He keeps looking up, making up stories about people who splashed coffee in the ceiling, but he hears Luke’s heavy footsteps to his own bed on the other side of the room, just under the window. Michael turns on his side to look at him, and Luke’s sitting with his legs spread and one elbow resting against his knee, covering his face with both hands. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, when it’s Michael who’s been under Order Prison treatment for six months.

“I just don’t want my friends to die. It doesn’t get much more complex than that,” he shrugs, but his eyes are on the floor, frowning and staring down, and Michael follows his eyes to the ugly dark green carpet, wonders if there are stories there, too. Probably. There are stories everywhere. “And yeah, I know, absolutely shocking! Chaos witches have friends. Chaos witches care if their friends live or die!” he laughs, open-mouthed and loud, but it sounds mean. Michael only meets his eyes in silence, not smiling. “We’re just people. People who have been dying for way too long.”

He hasn’t known Luke for long enough that he could say that he knows him, but from the wide eyes alone his gut tells him he should shut the fuck up. But he’s made a habit of ignoring his instincts before, always has. It’s part of his charm.

“So the solution is to kill your murderers? Keep the killing spree going for as long as possible?” he snorts.

Luke gives him a dirty look. “That’s not what we’re doing.”

Sitting up, he ignores the restraint of the handcuffs around his wrists, how Luke still hasn’t moved to help him out of those yet. He sits cross-legged, lets the blanket fall off his shoulders. Without it, he feels unprotected, like that is a shield keeping him from reality. But the jumper -- Luke’s jumper -- is keeping him warm, and the coldness that he feels has more to do with the look of incredulity coming from Luke than with his clothes.

“What _are_ you doing?” he asks. Luke’s quiet, then, looking at him, his expression changing to blankness, like the question is way too broad for a direct reply, so Michael narrows it down for him. “Telling me to pretend like I haven’t woken up, lying to your friends.”

“Halsey and Geordie are not my friends,” he spits back, standing up, and Michael only looks at him, because he can’t argue with that, can’t tell who those people are at all, much less to Luke. Luke starts pacing around the room, and continues talking. “They’re not. I mean it. They’re allies. There’s a difference. My real friends are about to die. My allies are about to kill me.”

There are moments that feel like getting punched, air taken forcefully out of your lungs and head getting suddenly empty, mind blank and no knee-jerk reaction at all. And then there’s getting slapped by words, Michael’s reticent tone as he blinks a couple of times, trying to make some sense of the words just said to him while Luke seems to hear his voice saying them only when they echo in his head. Luke pauses, too, stops pacing around to look at Michael. Michael’s staring at him, and wordlessly, Luke walks to him and grabs his wrists.

He stares down at his hands, the grip a bit too tight, and he’s about to ask just what the hell is going on when he looks up at him and sees the petrol-black of his eyes, expanding over the irises, making everything dark. Michael sighs, looking back down at his wrists in time to see the bracelet curling around one of his wrists again, and then Luke’s letting go of his wrists and walking with no purpose around the room again.

“Luke,” he says. Luke doesn’t look at him. “Luke, they won’t kill you. You’re being paran--”

“Oh, my God!” Luke yells, actually yells, so out of nowhere that it startles Michael, makes him frown and sit back on the bed when he was thinking of standing up. It feels like the room’s too small for them both plus Luke’s racing mind. Michael tries to stop his mind with his own thoughts, but his Magick is restrained and Luke’s gesturing wildly. “You don’t know shit about us, Michael! I’m not being paranoid! I’m outliving my usefulness.” 

By the last words he’s breathing hard, staring at Michael, and Michael thinks he may start crying.

Michael wishes he could say he’s scared, but he’s got something different in his chest, making his heart sink like someone’s wrapping their claws around it and dragging it down. He thinks maybe it’s some small dosage of empathy, maybe just his tendency of ignoring confusion when someone looks like they might break. 

But you can’t break what’s already broken.

“Luke,” he says, again, softer this time, and Luke takes a deep breath, staring at him, like he may hear him this time. So he tries again. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

As if the past minutes had never happened, a mischievous smile goes back to his mouth, so fitting there that Michael doesn’t think he could imagine him in any other way. “You won’t like it.”

“It’s not about me,” he insists, shrugging.

Luke hits his tongue against the roof of his mouth three times. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Then he drops to his bed, sitting, blinking at Michael with that mischievous smile spreading. “Oh, but it is.”

The way he looks at Michael is different, then, like Michael could almost pinpoint when smugness turns to fear again, but this time panic doesn’t follow. Luke sighs softly and stares back at the ugly dirty floor, scratches the back of his head as he murmurs something under his breath. His age becomes too obvious now, made evident by the way he looks so lost without someone telling him where to go next. And Michael figures if he wants to spit out cryptic words and make it seem like it’s not important the next second, that’s alright. 

Right now, there’s something that calls his attention more than Luke’s chaotic plays with words. 

“We can drop it if you want,” Michael says softly, raising his eyebrows. He hears the mindfulness in his voice, the one Karen’s always told him to have. It almost makes him snort, but he’s looking at Luke, pulling his legs up to sit cross-legged on his bed. “How old are you?”

Luke frowns, like that’s so bizarrely irrelevant Michael may be sick. “Seventeen.”

“Me too,” Michael says, with a reticent tone. And then he voices his further thoughts: “So you’re a seventeen year old boy, with -- no offense -- magick not all that powerful, and a blowtorch. Why does Daryl trust you?” 

Luke looks at him again in the eye, smirking. “But that’s not dropping the subject, Mikey! That’s exactly what we were talking about,” he smiles, toothy and cocky, and Michael only blinks a couple of times, unsure. Then Luke pulls his legs up, too, mimics Michael in how he’s sitting, with his back very straight and his head tilted back. “He doesn’t. Why do you think Halsey and Geordie are here?”

Instead of correcting Luke again on calling him by a nickname he hasn’t earned the right to use, Michael chuckles, tilting his head to the side too, somehow finding amusement in the twisted mirror in front of him. “Because they’re your buddies who were so eager to help?”

“That’s the spirit,” Luke laughs quietly, then rolls his eyes and shakes his head in a funny way that makes Michael laugh, even if it’s weakly and bitten back. “Um,” he clears his throat, looking serious again. “It’s me.”

Michael cocks an eyebrow. Luke just points at himself, as if his point needed illustrating. 

“I don’t follow.”

Luke sighs. “God, do you even pay attention at all to anything I say?!” he snorts, and moves to sit with his back against the wall. His tone is loud and angry but he’s got an amused smile on his lips, like he thinks this is funny. 

“Your half-words that tell me basically nothing, ever? Those you mean?” Michael teases back, talking loud and with a frown, but he’s biting back a smile again. He doesn’t know why he bothers to play along, decides against giving it much thought. 

On the other side of the room Luke chuckles, and then takes his time with making up his mind with how to say whatever he wants to say. It looks like it’s difficult for him, choosing words, but Michael doesn’t have anywhere to go anytime soon. He watches Luke sigh and frown and smile until he decides against it for what feels like eternity, before Luke groans and drops on his back on the bed. Staring at the ceiling, maybe noticing the same dark stains that Michael had before, he says:

“The prophecy about you spending half a year in the Order Prison. The Trinity said that anyone who tried to break you out of there would die and get you killed in the process.”

Michael’s staring and he doesn’t care this time. Though he seeks eye-contact Luke keeps staring at the ceiling. Michael’s heart speeds up, so hard he thinks he could have a heart-attack, but he tells himself to remain calm, be put-together, quieter the chaos in his heart to let order prevail. 

“Except for you,” Michael tries, meaning it as a suggestion but sounding assertive instead. “You wouldn’t. You’d be able to do it.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, tone casual, like he could be bothered. “I don’t even know why. It’s not because I’m so powerful or strong or skilled. I had dumb luck. But just with that one thing. I’m not really lucky. I’m not really anything. But The Trinity saw me getting you out of that building alive.”

“Can you look at me while we talk about this? This is a big deal for me. I was in a fucking prophecy,” he sighs, voice a mix of eerily quiet and confused. 

“No, I can’t,” Luke says simply, still staring up. 

Frustrated, Michael drops back on the bed, too, with his arms spread just because he can, looking up. His voice is a murmur when he asks: “How long have you known?”

“Forever,” he scoffs. “No, not really. Only when Daryl took an interest in me and Jack. I was twelve. Daryl wanted to meet in person with me, told me I was going to play an important role in his life, because I would save his son’s life, and set him on a path back to his father.” ‘

“Well,” Michael pauses, bitter and disgusted. Not with Luke exactly, but with Daryl cornering a twelve year old and manipulating him into becoming one of his lackeys. The most important one. “Congratulations. You did it.”

“I did,” Luke chuckles. “And now there’s no reason to keep me alive anymore.”

* * *

The weeks before his arrest were some of the worst of his life. He knows because he remembers them better than the following months. There was a certain tension in the air, his Order magick telling him that his instincts were right when he looked at trees and birds and it felt as if they were mocking his fate. Michael’s never been one to believe fate all that much, always inclined for free will instead of believing all the tales of how they were all just pawns in a greater scheme. But he did feel it, he felt everything. He rolled his eyes back and he looked at the world looking back at him, and he knew the air smelled different, the atmosphere changed all around him whenever he took a step in whatever direction, all of them wrong for his feet.

Michael knows a thing or two about wrong directions. 

Michael knows a thing or two about wrong.

Against Karen’s warning, he did get closer and closer to the Hood family, even going to their house a couple of times. Karen hated it, made him swear he’d never do that again, but he was never good at rules, at being told what to do. Instead he’d just skip school and go to Calum’s place, play video games all day and eat pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He was seventeen, had a best friend so rich they could afford five people working in the house, and his parents, both in the Council, were barely ever home. 

Sometimes his sister was, though.

When Michael looked at her, it was hard to keep his eyes from rolling back, and he fought it because he knew it wouldn’t be opaque whiteness that Calum and Mali-Koa would see. That dirty version of his eyes nobody should see, ever. He never knew what was her magick, but he looked at her and he knew she was looking at him, too.

Once, a week and a half before everybody knew who was his real father, he was sprawled on the carpet of Calum’s bedroom, eating gummy worms and laughing about Calum’s crush on the girl in their class who could manipulate fire. Michael felt that something bad was coming to wash away all the laughing, so he was set on laughing extra hard, on making the muscles on his face hurt from all the opportunities to smile he would not waste.

Mali-Koa got home at half past six, like she did every day, and they could hear her downstairs. Calum got quiet all of sudden, and Michael refused to follow suit, still smiled and tried coming up with an even more bizarre scenario for Calum to act on his crush.

Then it became impossible to say anything, because Mali-Koa was knocking on their door.

Michael felt his body go stiff as he pulled himself to sit cross-legged, looking at the door like it held a threat. It did, in a way, but he didn’t know to which extent just yet. But Calum just sighed, turned to Michael with a frown and worried eyes of a seventeen year old who could very well be the most caring person in the family. 

“She’ll be awarded next week, something to do with her becoming a lieutenant, and she’s nervous,” Calum said, voice rushed, as he stood up, just to fill Michael in, like he did with everything else. “They’re hunting someone, but she won’t tell me anything about it. It’s not going well.” And then, closer to the door, he just mouthed the words: “Be nice.”

Michael used to think he was always nice. He’d have no trouble being nice to Mali-Koa for the thousandth time since he and Calum started hanging out. 

When Calum opened the door, though, what he saw wasn’t quite her. It was her in the sense that it was still his best friend’s older sister, but it wasn’t her because she looked devastated. Her hair was down, which he hadn’t seen before, only up in a bun, and she had bags under her eyes. She ran her hand over her hair, combing it and making it look less of a mess. Her eyes didn’t fall on Michael at first, or at second or at third. Instead she walked in Calum’s bedroom purposefully, wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into a tight hug, with her closed eyes against his shoulder.

At seventeen, he was taller than her already. 

Calum just hugged her back, murmuring something as he kept her close. She sighed and said, a murmur just loud enough that Michael could hear from where he was sitting on the floor: “I don’t know if I can do this. It’s too much pressure, and. We can’t. We have to give them someone but my team is still in the dark. I’m still in the dark.”

It felt too much like intruding, eavesdropping on something delicate.

Even though his instincts told him _run_ , he only cleared his throat, to make her aware of his presence in the room, just on the other side of the king-sized bed Calum had for himself. Mali-Koa snapped her eyes open like a snake ready to attack, and when she saw it was only him, only her little brother’s teenage best friend, she forced a smile, but still didn’t relax. She pulled back from Calum’s embrace, patted his shoulder with an awkward wave in Michael’s direction.

“I didn’t know you had company. I’ll come back later. Sorry to interrupt.”

“You can stay if you want. We’re going to marathon ‘90s TV shows,” Calum raised his eyebrows with a helpful smile, and Michael tried to smile back, even if it came out forced. Mali-Koa just shook her head no, though, and excused herself so she could leave.

Calum walked back to the carpet, sat in front of Michael, and said:

“Sometimes I don’t think the military is all that good for us. It isn’t for Mali, at least.”

Michael didn’t have any experiences with that. All he knew from the military is that he should stay away so they wouldn’t know. And even though it clicked for him right then who it was that they were hunting, Michael still told himself it’d been too long, and nobody knew about Karen’s only mistake. 

Nobody knew who he was.

* * *

“Do you really think they’ll kill you?”

“It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.”

“...”

“But that’s okay. I woke you up before, you should go back to bed.”

* * *

Here’s the joke of the century: Karen tilting her head to the side in a way that could only be described as condescending, staring at Michael, saying: “You need to have fun every once in a while.”

Of course it’s because she has no idea that Michael and Calum skipped school almost every single day this week. She doesn’t know he bought a skateboard without her knowing about it, and has been going to the ramps four blocks down the school with Calum ever since. That’s been going for around a year. She doesn’t know anything about him, or not anything that matters, anyway. Michael wishes he could tell her why: that it’s because he doesn’t think she’d like what she sees. He’d like to do that just to spite her, just to watch her raise her eyebrows with how hurt she’d be, but still hold back tears or any human reaction at all.

Sometimes, these days, he wants to tell her that he knows they’re coming for him.

But instead he blinks at her slowly, and snorts. “You want me to have fun,” he repeats.

“You’ve been so quiet lately,” she says, on the other side of the dining room table. Michael didn’t blow up this one, ever. He has never done that thing again, so he likes to pretend it never happened. “I’m just… worried, I guess. What’s been bothering you?”

“Nothing,” he says, because it’s true.

Nothing has. He’s completely ignoring any threats and any whispers the wind tells him once he allows magick to come to him, because he’s set on not thinking about any of that. Mali-Koa’s team will catch their guy and that’s just not him. He’ll be fine. He _is_ fine.

No betrayal coming, if you keep your expectations low.

Karen sighs, pressing the napkin to the corners of her mouth to not mess up her lipstick. There’s frustration in her eyes when she looks away, stiffness in her muscles as she moves up. “Do you want a ride to school?”

“You never give me a ride to school.”

“I want to, today.”

Michael looks at her. “What’s today?”

The day of your arrest, she should have said, because she probably knew. That high in their social rank, a member of the Council of the Order, she must have known. But instead she just stares at him like she doesn’t understand the question, and Michael nods, stands up from his seat, helps her clear the table, and then they leave.

In the car, he can’t bring himself to make small talk. 

He says goodbye like he says goodbye every day, and there’s a weight on his shoulders like something’s boiling up inside of him, but he can’t slow it down any more than he can stop it from blowing. He’ll just have to watch himself go up to pieces, he supposes.

Calum greets him with a high five and the skateboard in his hands. He’s brought Michael’s, always takes his home so Karen doesn’t know about his favorite hobby. “Up for skipping class today?” Calum asks.

He snorts. “Always.”

In front of the school, there are so many people that even if he left with Karen’s car still parked on the other side of the street, she’d probably not see him, even with his dark purple hair. There’s a school just a few blocks down, but it isn’t as big as his, so most of the kids there go to his school before the time for class starts properly. Mostly it’s boys dating girls from Michael’s school, pulling the effort of going up those few blocks for a good morning kiss. Michael thinks it’s sort of sweet, but he always tells Calum they’re whipped, and it’s lame.

Someone bumps his shoulder to Michael. It’s a boy around his height, with a piercing on his eyebrow, but not a bar like Michael had for about a week before Karen actually realized what he’d done and made him take it off. It’s a ring. The boy has crooked teeth but a nice wide smile. He looks a few years older than Michael, so Michael just assumes he’s there for a girlfriend. Or boyfriend.

“Sorry,” the boy says, and Michael’s about to say no problem, when he looks at the boy the one with the ring on his eyebrow has under his arm. He’s definitely taller than Michael but not by much, blond, with his lip pierced. He’s wearing a black leather jacket, and when he looks at Michael, he pauses, and his eyes widen.

Michael looks back at the boy, tilting his head to the side a bit.

“C’mon,” Calum says, gesturing so Michael goes with him. 

But Michael doesn’t move. He keeps looking at the boy who’s looking at him like he’s seen a ghost. Like he knows something nobody else knows, but could be willing to share. He watches it as the boy tugs at his friend’s shirt, but the one who bumped Michael’s shoulder by accident doesn’t give him any attention. Instead he murmurs, “Let’s go, Luke, Ashton’s in the car, waiting.”

Reluctantly, the boy looks away from Michael, and Michael looks away from him.

With attention back on himself, Calum hands Michael his skateboard, so they can skate away from the school. He’s already got his down, one foot on it, ready to go, but he’s waiting for Michael.

When Michael’s hands touch the skateboard, though, it feels alien. He frowns and stares down, his vision suddenly out of focus. He holds his breath, blinking several times so the image comes into focus, just his hands holding the skateboard. But once he blinks, his eyes roll back, and his vision changes.

He looks up to meet Calum’s eyes, too, but he can’t see his eyes. All he sees is vibrant blue, and all around him, masses of blue take notice of him, and the dead energy of walls and the ground become threatening. Michael holds his breath, feeling his own eyes widen as he stares at Calum, but he can’t see his facial expression with just the molecules of his body vibrating in front of Michael.

“I can’t believe she was right,” Calum says, loud and terrified, taking steps away from Michael.

Michael hears his words like they’re background noise. He blinks nervously but the world keeps being full of void and distant noises, Calum’s energy a mess of blue that keeps walking away from him. Michael can feel Calum’s panic in his veins, and it makes him yell, “Wait!” but he’s not breathing anymore. Everyone’s energies are blue, and they all start talking, until they’re all screaming.

Calum moves to the background, and then there are guards everywhere.

His heart is at his throat, and he can’t seem to make it go down again. He tries blinking it away, starts moving his hands to try and get people to give him space to run, but when he raises his hands, his skateboard goes up. Michael blinks away the void in time to watch it blow up to pieces. That’s when the screaming intensifies, and Michael feels his vision blur with tears.

He’s breathing hard, looking around to try and get somewhere safe, people running away from him like he’s got an infectious disease. He sees Mali-Koa making way, and after her, a tall man with his hair pulled in a low ponytail. He gives Michael a mean smile, and Michael’s chest won’t stop rising too hard, making his muscles hurt, but his legs can’t move anymore.

Right in front of his school, with public who never asked for this, he hears the man say: “Michael Gordon. So you’re Daryl Clifford’s bastard son,” he mocks, cocking his eyebrows up. 

Everyone listens.

Everyone knows.

The gasps are worse than the screaming. He can’t bring himself to say no, just wishes he could. There are hands holding his arms, ice cold, before he even looks around. He searches the crowd anyway, looks for his best friend, for his mother, for any teachers who could come and say that this is wrong, that they can’t just take Michael. But he doesn’t see Calum, Karen, or anyone who could stop this. All he sees is Mali-Koa, giving Michael a dirty look.

They’re all giving Michael dirty looks. They’re all chanting things he doesn’t understand, as the cold hands grab tightly around his arms. When he looks, it’s only one woman, and her hands have turned to heavy cold iron. She digs her metal fingers so deeply against his skin that he feels it hurt, but he can’t move. He looks at the man and tries speaking, but his voice fails him.

As his eyes keep searching the crowd for a friendly face when all he gets is the opposite, he finds the boy from before, lip-pierced and blond. His friend has his arms around him, keeping him from running. Only he doesn’t try to run away from Michael, like everybody else. He tries to run toward him. He’s screaming something, trying to make his friend let him go, but the boy with the long hair keeps both his arms restraining him, stopping him.

Michael feels the warmth of a tear rolling down his cheek, looking at the scene.

Somehow that right there is worse than everything combined. 

But he does feel his conscience start to fade away, so that could be it, too.

The man with the ponytail touches Michael’s chin, forces him to look his way.

“Representing the Council of the Order, I arrest you for being the offspring of a Chaos witch,” he smirks, and to his left, someone spits on Michael’s arm. It’s a kid who went to school with him. Samuel something or the other. Ponytail smirks at the boy, like he approves.

Michael can’t turn his head away with the strong hold on his arms and the hand on his chin, but he does look away, disgusted. That is the last thing he feels, before someone smacks something to the back of his head. First, the sting, the burning pain.

Then, nothing.


	5. i saw the faces slowly slowly slip away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NO LIE the comments i've been getting in this and the people sending me asks on tumblr make me smile so big i think my face might split (oh, no). it's all worth it, though. thank you so much for the support, guys. words cannot describe how much i love writing this, and how happy i am that you're on board with the witch boys!!!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

When he comes to his senses, he wants to throw up. There’s something about the way his limbs aren’t his anymore. His legs feel numb, and his arms hurt so, so much, from carrying all his weight. With a frown he stares up, blinking fast, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness of the room he’s in. It’s not so much a room but a cell, and when he looks up, he sees why it feels like his weight is too much for him: he’s hanging from the ceiling, chains wrapped tightly around his wrists. The first thing he does is try to stand on his feet, but he’s got no shoes and the floor is cold. Still, he manages, and it makes him feel just a tiny bit better. He tries moving his wrists, but it’s no use. The chains are tight and the more he struggles against them, the more they cut the skin.

The first deep cut against it feels like getting burned. He parts his lips but bites back the scream, the metal making a thin fillet of blood run down his arm, until it meets his shirt, and disappears in a discreet new stain. He breathes in and out, tries to keep his mind from racing, tries to keep his mind still working, but that too, feels a little useless. His arms are mostly dormant and he isn’t sure how much longer his legs can take his weight. 

He blinks a couple of times, looking ahead.

Michael’s so thirsty that he feels like he can’t speak, his throat gone dry and useless.

He doesn’t know how long he stays there, going between forcing his eyes open and forcing them closed, but he never gets what he wants. At some point, his face is suddenly warm, and he notices it’s his tears freely rolling down his cheeks with some confusion. It’s a strange feeling, being present but only half, body too tired and mind not keeping up. To an extent, he knows where he is. He remembers being arrested, Calum disappearing in the crowd, Mali-Koa staring at him in disgust, and the man with the ponytail telling him he’s guilty of being the offspring of a Chaos witch.

If he could have fought back, if there was any time at all, he’d ask him how come he could be guilty of something he did not choose. Given the chance, he’d be the happy orphan of John Gordon.

Karen had tried to give him that chance, and she failed. She was discovered. He was, too, in the process. Michael couldn’t help but wonder about her, if she had a cell next to his, if she was being treated just as poorly, ignored for just as long. He hoped not. God, he hoped not.

The door opens with the softest of clicks. It’s not a savior, but his first visitor. It’s the man with the mean ugly smile, the one with raised eyebrows and a ponytail. He’s wearing Council clothes, so white it makes Michael’s eyes hurt when he looks directly at him, finds that he can’t, that he has to look down. Michael licks his lips to fool himself into thinking that’s water, and breathes out heavily, even though his lungs are starting to hurt, starting to not be okay with the poor ventilation of the cell, no windows and just a heavy door keeping him locked. 

Breathing in and out the same air. How much carbon can he produce before there’s no oxygen left?

“Welcome to our facilities,” the man says, and though Michael’s staring down at his white shoes, he hears the mockery in his voice. “We hope you enjoy your stay, Michael Clifford.”

“My--” he tries, and then almost immediately stops himself. He coughs, coughs so much he ends up spitting blood on the floor. His whole body shakes as he frowns and stares down, shuts his eyes for a second to try and regain some strength. “My name’s Michael Gordon.”

“Is it? We must’ve made some mistake, then, we’re so sorry,” the man pauses, and for a second he hums. The door closes, locking them both inside. He walks around Michael, the cold fingers of one of his hands touching Michael’s numb arms that can barely register the touch. He still flinches away, but he can’t move. “Nice try, but no. We know who you are, Michael. We’ve been looking for you for so long.”

Michael chuckles, and more blood comes to his mouth. By now, he’s more or less aware that he’s been drugged, just isn’t sure how much. He feels something still stinging in the back of his neck, figures he’s been injected with something, but can’t remember the exact time it happened. It must’ve been when he was blacked out, which only makes it worse. He doesn’t want to think of people hanging his unconscious drugged body up these chains, doesn’t want to think of the looks of scorn and disgust.

Spitting the blood in his mouth again, he raises his eyebrows to try and meet the man’s eyes, but the man isn’t facing him. “I hope you realize how creepy that sounds, dude. I’m still underage, and you could be my dad.”

It’s apparently not the right thing to say.

The man turns so he’s facing Michael again, and Michael can only see the icy blue of his eyes for a brief second before the man is connecting his fist to Michael’s face. It’s not a slap as much as it’s a punch, and it makes his whole body jerk, and he loses balance, relying on the chains to support his weight again. He screams with the pain around his wrists more than with the throbbing pain on his jaw, and then he’s coughing again, spitting blood on the floor, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to hit the man.

“I will not tolerate any petulance,” he says, matter-of-factly, looking every bit as composed as he was before Michael had provoked him. Then he sighs softly, and tilts his head to the side. “But I’m glad you brought up your father. That’s why you’re here, anyway.”

Michael laughs, even through the pain and the blood in his teeth. 

“Think you got the wrong guy. You probably learn more about my old man in an internship at the Order building than I’ve known my whole life.”

He holds his breath, prepares himself for another punch, but it doesn’t come. It’s alarming, makes his muscles stiff, the expectation of something that just isn’t arriving. Not like he’d expected, anyway. He looks at the man and the corners of his mouth curve up. For a second, he just stares at Michael, and Michael’s reading so much into that. He can’t help the magick that comes to him, making his fingertips vibrate with the humidity of the cell, wanting to blink away this world and connect to the other, feel his motivations and his frustrations, get under his skin and somehow find a way out.

Michael’s not giving up. He’s a survivor. This is just another obstacle.

But then the man cocks an eyebrow, says, “We’ll see about that,” and takes something from his pocket.

It’s a small device, nothing like Michael has ever seen. At first he thinks it’s a blade, because it sort of looks like it, except the tip of it isn’t sharp. Michael frowns, staring down, biting back his tongue so he doesn’t say anything this time, because he’s still sort of waiting for some type of punishment for what he’s said before. 

Then it comes.

The man touches his device to the middle of Michael’s chest, and it’s like his heart is being clawed out of his chest, his soul being sucked out of his body. He drops his head back so hard, his chest inflating and rising, that it feels like he’ll break his neck. He screams, so loud his throat scratches, shutting his eyes closed with tears escaping the corners of his eyes. 

He gasps for air, but the man presses it hard to his chest again, and this time the wave of shocks make his whole body jerk, and the screams escape his throat before he can even register them.

The man stops, takes a step back.

Michael’s breathing so hard his whole body feels alien to him, like it isn’t his. His body isn’t his and he can’t shake the feeling that it’ll never belong to him again. He blinks away the tears and keeps gasping for air, staring at the man as the man gives him the calmest of smiles, playing with the little pen in his hands. 

“You’ll find that we can be very persuasive here,” he chuckles. “This is only the beginning, Michael.”

And then, it starts again.

* * *

His body’s shaking and he’s being pinned down by his shoulders. Michael still forces his body forward, and the scream starts in his throat but he can’t manage to get the words out, and this time it isn’t because his throat betrays him. It’s because he opens his eyes, and sees that the hands on his shoulders don’t belong to the man in the ponytail. It’s Luke, frowning, with big blue eyes staring back at him questioningly. He’s calling Michael’s name, Michael can tell, but it’s only by the way his lips move. Michael can’t listen to anything right now. He’s still got his own screams echoing in his head.

Now that he’s stopped Michael’s body from jerking forward, Luke tries touching his arm to call him back to reality, but as Michael’s eyes follow that hand touching his skin, all he feels is the thin cold fingers made of metal wrapping around his biceps, restraining him, preparing to take him away.

It’s a knee-jerk reaction, shoving him away as strongly as he possibly can, and his bottom lip’s quivering, his whole body still feels like he won’t stop shaking for a while. He breathes in, and when he breathes out, his shoulders relax, and he finally gets acquainted with motel room 93, the dark surroundings, ugly carpet and stained ceiling. Trying to steady his breath, he looks at Luke again.

With Michael’s shove, Luke’s fallen on Michael’s bed, sitting as far away from Michael as possible. He’s got his widened, too, a hurt expression on his face that Michael can’t make sense of. It’s like he’s been stabbed, not just shoved away. Michael tries speaking, but his voice still hasn’t caught up with what his head has, that he’s safe now, or working towards safety anyway, still telling his body it was just a dream, and he wasn’t back there in the Order Prison again.

Luke’s jaw sets and he looks away from Michael, big blue eyes avoiding his. He seems to sit even further away, putting some extra distance between for what he reads as appropriate. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to--” he stops himself, taking a deep breath, and stands up. He straightens his T-shirt, with a deep frown on his face, eyes that won’t meet Michael’s. “I won’t touch you again.”

Michael frowns, too, not to fight against emotional transparency but because he’s confused. His breath still isn’t steady, and Luke’s starting to move away. Feeling as though he isn’t a hundred per cent back yet, Michael’s hands reach blindingly in the dark until they find one of Luke’s wrists, and then he’s pulling him, fingernails probably too long clawing at his skin. “That’s not what happened,” Michael manages to say, and his voice sounds strange to his own ears, but he doesn’t care.

Not now. Now he only cares that he’s safe.

He pulls Luke down, ignoring the confusion spreading all over his face, and when Luke finally sits on Michael’s bed again, Michael takes a deep breath, and his fingers keep pulling Luke’s arms closer and closer, until he’s close enough that Michael can feel his shoulders going limp in exhaustion, and he drops his head to Luke’s shoulder.

With his eyelids closed, he feels like he can calm down his racing heart.

The room is still spinning, and he doesn’t understand why he can’t access his magick. He wants to know why there’s such hesitance to Luke’s heavy hands, why it takes him a moment of Michael breathing him and out with his face buried on his shoulder for Luke to finally put his hands on him, one at the end of his back, the other at the back of his head. There’s something, he knows, that blocks the magick when it tries to come back to him, but he can’t remember what’s that. 

The memories are coming back in chunks. All of them. 

Luke presses his head against Michael’s, and his fingers don’t feel cold anymore, not against his neck where his hair ends, shyly sneaking up, making Michael feel a shiver down his spine with how his fingertips rub softly against his skin. Not a bad type of shiver, even, but his shoulders go up, and he breathes out loudly, heavily, feeling like his whole weight is being dropped against Luke as he does it. But Luke just keeps holding him, not saying a word.

And then he remembers. First the bracelet on his wrist, with the gems inhibiting his magick, and then why he’s really there. He’s not sure what he’s thought a second ago that Luke was, but he’s Chaos. That’s probably why he thought Michael had shoved him away. Or maybe because he’s Michael’s kidnapper. One of the two, most definitely.

Instead of addressing that, or backing off, what he does is to sigh again, quieter this time, and then ask: “You were there, weren’t you? I remember you now.”

Luke stops moving his hand. Michael sort of misses the soothing way his fingers moved against the back of his neck already, but he won’t complain. Luke keeps mute for the next few seconds, hands frozen, until Michael raises his head to look at him. That’s when Luke retrieves his hands, and stares down at his thighs, sighing.

“I couldn’t do anything,” he says, defensively. “You said it yourself: my magick isn’t anything big. I couldn’t possibly have stopped a whole team of Order witches, especially not with so many people around. They’d kill me on spot, and still take you.”

Blinking a couple of times, looking at him, Michael can’t help a little chuckle. “You’re very inconsistent.”

Looking him in the eye again, he smirks. He seems to take pride in shrugging, giving him a sideways look, saying: “And very psychologically unstable,” he raises his eyebrows, the smirk spreading. “Jack says when they opened me up, they must’ve messed with my brain, too, and took half just in case. They just forgot to put it right back in, and now I’m like this,” he widens his eyes, that maniac smile coming for just a split second, before he’s looking all cocky, like he’s daring Michael to disapprove of what he’s most proud of in himself.

Michael smiles quietly. He actually surprises himself with the way he smiles, shaking his head a bit, looking at him. “Not what I mean. It’s just that you go from being complacent to defensive so fast. That’s inconsistent,” he explains. Luke parts his lips, but he still seems a little lost, so Michael goes on: “I wasn’t attacking you, asking you why you didn’t do anything to save me. I remember you. I really remember you. You were-- you tried, though. Someone stopped you, and that was smart.”

Luke averts his gaze from Michael again, looks away with that frown coming back.

It’s the weirdest thing, that shadow of guilt that passes his face, like it doesn’t matter at all what Michael said, or what he could possibly say next. Michael wonders if Luke feels that he’d maybe failed a stranger, and if that’s any better than Karen must feel. And then thinking about his mother makes his head and heart ache, and he doesn’t want to go there.

Clearing his throat a little awkwardly, his voice sounds harsher like the spell is broken. “How did you know I was having nightmares?”

Luke snorts. “Not wrong to figure out. You were screaming.”

Michael rolls his eyes, and shoves him.

Luke rubs his shoulder with an offended expression, but he’s smirking before his hand even leaves his shoulder. Then he stands up again, walks away from Michael’s bed and from him, and Michael’s about to ask if this is it, whether their conversation is over, when Luke opens the window again. Michael covers his face with his hands and lets out a whine, the light offending him.

It’s not rainy anymore. Still cloudy, but he can’t smell rain, and the sun is shining bright between those clouds, threatening to destroy them just to it can shed light everywhere. Michael’s sure a lot of interesting things would come out if all the dark corners were to suddenly have some light.

“There’s a gas station a couple of blocks down the street,” Luke says, pensive, “and I’m kind of tired of having chips for lunch. I can get us some Cup Noodles, convince the people at the convenience store to use their microwave, and then I bring them back here real fast. What do you say?”

Michael just stares at him, quiet.

Luke shifts his weight to the other foot, still next to the window. He’s barely a shadow with his back against the light, but Michael still sees the blue in his eyes. “I can do mine first, so yours won’t be as cold when I come back,” he adds, as if that changes everything.

It’s just so fucking absurd, how trusting he is. For someone who’s been through torture Michael can’t see himself going through -- at least he hopes he hasn’t, and there’s no scars in his body to prove him wrong -- and the no doubt harsh life he’s led, he trusts people awfully easily. Or maybe just Michael. Maybe he’s just a dumb overtrusting boy who believes too much in prophecies and thinks the fact that three creepy ladies said he’d be the one to take Michael out of the Order Prison means they’re connected, or something.

It’s laughable, and Michael sort of pities him.

But that’s the side of him that ignores the pull, his head falling to Luke’s shoulder when all he needed was to feel safe. That’s the side of him that ignores that he did.

Michael tilts his head to the side, taking a deep breath.

“Can you bring me gummy worms too?”

Luke smiles. An actual smile, that conveys what smiles usually do. Not a mean smirk or a malicious grin. Just a smile, and Michael smiles back. “Sure,” Luke says, sitting on his bed and grabbing combat boots. One of the sweatpants over it, the other tucked in, he grabs his jacket, which Michael assumes has his wallet in, and with a wink, he leaves the room.

* * *

Once he’s alone, he goes back to the bathroom for another shower. 

There’s a thought in the back of his mind, telling him he’s stupid for not doing the most obvious thing ever: escaping. Luke’s out of the fucking motel and Halsey and Geordie are who knows where, doing who knows what, and this is his chance. Another one in a series of chances that pass him ignored. The bitterness in his heart just comes from glancing at his clothes still pooled behind the door, not by contemplating his own stupidity in staying. 

But there’s this other thought that fights back the first: if he does run, even if he manages to find somewhere safe to stay, contact Karen, assuming she’s alright and free, still one consequence to his escape would come: they’d kill Luke. Without a second thought.

Michael can’t have that. Not after remembering him that day, the look of complete despair as Michael was taken away. It would be too selfish. 

Selfish, that’s the word he’s going for, as he strips out of Luke’s clothes and gets in the shower again.

* * *

When Luke comes back, Michael’s sitting on the windowsill, staring outside.

He doesn’t know where they are, other than maybe five hours or so away from the city, but the place seems nice. This is just a motel down the open road, and he can actually see woods from the window of their room. It’s an old window with wooden shutters that crack when Michael forces them more open than they were before. But the view is still nice, even if it’s just dark green and then the sky.

Luke opens and closes the door fast, and Michael almost misses that his eyes go full black as he locks the door in a way that make it so keys can’t even fit in the keyhole. He only glances Michael’s way briefly before he’s kicking off his boots, embracing one of the cups while still holding the other in his palm as he tries getting rid of his jacket. Michael watches him with a half-smile and raised eyebrows, and then Luke’s kneeling on the bed, walking to Michael, handing him a plastic cup of noodles as he says:

“You won’t believe what happened.”

“Tell me,” he humors Luke, biting back the smile as Luke inexplicably gives him a metal spoon, that was either stolen or altered to look like this. 

Not seemingly that affected by Michael sitting on the windowsill and this close to freedom, Luke sits cross-legged on his bed, sticks his own spoon to the noodles, and says: “I met the most amazing person in the world. Her name is Elizabeth, so I told her my Mum’s name was Elizabeth, and then she just said I looked like her son! Except I’m not a redhair. But I told her I could totally bleach my hair, and she said she’d pay for it, too, ‘cause apparently her son is the Order army and she misses him or something,” he shrugs, making a face as he looks down at his noodles. “But she was super cool, and she hugged me before I left, so,” he shrugs, looking so smug, that Michael has to stop and stare.

He chuckles. “Is that so?”

“Yep,” Luke smiles to himself proudly, and then tries to get some of his noodles in the spoon. They all fall back to the cup, and he rolls his eyes, still filling his spoon with the hopefully still hot liquid, and slurping. Michael actually has to laugh at that, but Luke seems to miss what’s the joke. “You took a shower,” he says, tentatively.

His back hurts a little against the solidness of the window, but he doesn’t mind it that much. Self-consciously though, he runs his hand over his still wet hair, and nods quietly, pressing the spoon against the inner side of the cup to try and cut the noodles so he can eat them. He brings some to his mouth, and they’re still hot enough that it burns his tongue a tiny bit. It’s in a good way, though, makes him feel alive. He hasn’t tasted real food, or as close to it as it gets, in so long. It makes him want to just smile foolishly. Instead he takes another spoonful, and when he’s done, he looks back at Luke.

Luke’s slurping on his Cup Noodles again.

“I did. I also went through your things. Sorry, but I needed clean clothes, and I didn’t really have anywhere else to look for them,” he frowns, and tries to sound unapologetic and hard, but he knows that’s not how his voice comes out. “With the nightmare I just… I was sweaty. I needed a shower.”

“Nah, that’s fine. I just got clothes, a few guns, and my blow-torch in there. Nothing special,” he shrugs.

Michael looks at him some more. He keeps thinking the more he’ll stare, the more it’ll make sense. 

Not quite. 

“This is impractical,” Luke declares, staring down at his Cup Noodles. Michael parts his lips, ready to defend the food at all costs, but then Luke blinks, and his eyes roll back. His black eyes don’t look back at Michael. His eyes don’t look anywhere. They just call for his magick, and then he’s sliding his finger gracefully over his own spoon, Michael holds his breath, watching him, and then Luke sits on his knees again, so he can get taller, reach for Michael in the window, and for a tiny second Michael’s paralyzed. Then he sees Luke’s touching his spoon, too. Michael stares down at the plastic cup, watches the end of the spoon divide until it’s a fork. “Better now, I think,” Luke says, and his eyes are still black.

Michael’s still holding his breath, looking at the black in his eyes, not able to get past them. 

That’s when Luke seems to realize, and he blinks back. His eyes are blue again, and he’s got a frown on his face, back to cross-legged, looking back at his food, twisting the fork around the noodles and then putting a forkful in his mouth to busy himself.

This is the type of silence Michael doesn’t know what to do with.

“I’m, um,” Michael clears his throat, looking at him, but Luke won’t look at him back. “Thanks.”

Luke just shrugs, and keeps eating.

This is so awkward, that Michael has to chuckle, even though his throat is suddenly dry and he’s hungry, mouth watering just thinking about the food so close to him. He allows himself to eat for a couple of seconds before he sighs softly, not even fully done with the swallowing when he turns to Luke again, saying: “Don’t go there.”

“Not going anywhere. Literally sitting here eating my noodles,” Luke replies.

He sounds so fucking grumpy.

Michael raises his eyebrows. “It’s the defensive thing again!” he points out, actually points at Luke as if Luke could physically see the change. Luke gives him an unimpressed look, and that alone makes Michael shakes his head quietly. “I just. I’m not used to that, okay? But don’t go thinking bad things, because I’m not saying bad things. It’s just very different than what I’m used to,” he pauses, stares down at his food, too. Luke’s quiet, and he wishes he didn’t have that damn bracelet on, so he could sense it, feel if there’s any change in the atmosphere. Instead, he swallows down dryly, snorting. “Well, I’m not one to talk anyway. At least you got every Chaos witch turning their eyes the same color as you. I’m just a freak.”

“What?” Luke asks, with a mouthful of food. Michael raises an eyebrow at him, with a shadow of smile on his lips, just because of how outraged Luke sounds. “What!” he says again, louder this time, not as a question but as a statement. Then he’s laughing, saying, “Fuck off,” as he looks Michael in the eye.

Blinking away the shock with his colors not turning any different color, he stares at him. He’s unable to tell what exactly is going on, but he’s glad that at least Luke’s smiling. Still looks like he could be persuaded to laugh a bit more, and Michael thinks that would be nice. He got a nice laugh, even though he just told Michael to fuck off. 

“You fuck off,” he mirrors the insult, frowning and laughing too, even though he doesn’t know what he’s laughing about. Maybe everything. The situation. Maybe laughing at himself for acting like he’s nine, shaking his head and stuffing his mouth with noodles as he stares out the window again, because Luke’s snorting once more.

“It’s just so fucking ridiculous that you’d say that you’re freak!” Luke says, still sounding more amused than serious. “You’re not a freak. You’re special.”

And saying that, he doesn’t sound like he’s joking anymore. 

Michael looks down, parting his lips. Luke doesn’t sound serious, exactly, just like he means it, which is different. Karen had regarded him in many ways since that one time he’d accidentally accessed his Chaos magick. None of those words had been that one. _Special_. It makes him stop, hold his breath for a tiny moment, but he won’t let himself sound so pathetic, raising his eyes in pools and asking if Luke really thinks so. Instead he just looks at him, tries to make it as much of a blank look as he possibly can.

Luke’s got a small smile in the corner of his mouth. “Have you ever seen it?”

“Yeah,” Michael nods slowly. “After I changed matter the first time, whenever my eyes rolled back, it was like that. I was twelve and Mum had a Polaroid camera, so I was the lamest preteen in the world and took a fucking picture, because I was curious,” he snorts.

“I would’ve done the same,” Luke decides, shrugging, and taking another forkful in his mouth.

Michael chuckles, then looks away again. “It was… I was a bit scared of myself. It looks,” he pauses, wrinkles his nose, sighing heavily right after. “It’s not the opaque whiteness of Order, not the petrol black of Chaos. It’s something mixed. Something dirty,” he says the last few words small, because that’s how he feels.

And Luke looks at him like he doesn’t notice that, like he doesn’t even get any of it at all.

Which Michael guesses makes sense. A Chaos witch couldn’t get it any more than an Order witch could.

“You’re telling me you think it’s dirty,” Luke says slowly, frowning a bit, and Michael just looks at him. It sort of stings, hearing the words out loud said by someone else’s mouth, even though Luke’s got his eyebrows raised in incredulosity. Michael only stares at him, though, watches Luke put his food aside so he can sit on his legs again, spreading his arms to gesture widely as he says, with a smile: “But it’s the universe!”

His face heats up. He snorts. “Excuse me?”

“It’s the universe!” Luke insists, smiling excitedly, like a child getting to share his newfound discoveries. “It’s all black but tainted white! I only saw it once, but it’s so,” he stops himself, smiling wider. “It’s fucking awesome, is what it is. Like you got grey clouds passing your black eyes and then you got stars, white little dots,” he presses his index finger to thin air, like he could pinpoint where each supposed star was. Michael raises his eyebrows with a vague smile, not really knowing how to react. Luke sits back on his legs, shrugging. “It’s the galaxy. Just like your hair.”

“You don’t mean that,” Michael says, even though he can tell Luke does.

Luke just shrugs once more, as if he’s made his point. Then he grabs his Cup Noodles again.

Michael catches his bottom lip between his teeth, looking at him.

He’s biting back an embarrassed smile, and even if he was asked, he still wouldn’t be able to tell what is it that makes his stomach sink in a way that feels good, and only makes him want to eat more. It’s not anything he’s felt before. But he laughs and shakes his head, finally looking away, and once he does, he can feel Luke looking back at him.

He hears his little laugh, too.


	6. with all the obvious lines all out of focus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pretty sure this is my favorite chapter so far. (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧ it's also the longest, so yay! thank you so much for the support, honestly. whenever i get comments or asks on tumblr about this fic, i level up. you guys make my day. ♥♥♥

“I don’t feel like sleeping anymore,” Michael says.

Luke’s lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and he’s chewing on what was once his fork. He’s somehow made it soft and smooth to the teeth, and he’s been consistently chewing on that for the past half hour or so. Enough time for Michael to finish his lunch, put the mostly empty plastic cup of the Cup Noodles inside of Luke’s by the other side of the windowsill, and stare out the window for what feels like forever. By the time he’s tired bored, he gets down from the windowsill, takes the two cups to the wastebasket in the bathroom, and then goes back to the room, dropping on his own bed. After lying on his stomach, pulling the blanket over his shoulders absentmindedly, he’s come to terms with his inability to fall asleep.

Apparently Luke doesn’t get how big that is.

“Huh,” he offers, still chewing on that fork.

Michael props himself on his elbows, looking at him. “I mean, I’ve been sleeping a lot.”

“You slept ‘til almost midday today, though,” Luke says, finally letting go of the fork, now studying it in his hands. Michael squints his eyes, tries to see from the distance between the beds if his eyes are black now, but the angle doesn’t allow it.

“But after everything I was always sleepy,” he frowns.

And then it seems to click for Luke, and he abruptly moves so he’s sitting, turned to Michael with a frown. He parts his lips to say something, then seems to decide against it. A smile washes away the expression from a second before, and he says: “Forgot your gummy worms in my jacket.”

Following him with his eyes as Luke stands up and goes to his bag, Michael sighs. “Not what you were going to say, but alright, I’ll take the damn gummy worms,” he shrugs. 

Keen on ignoring him, Luke walks to Michael’s bed with a bag of the candy in his hands. “Mind if I eat them too?” he asks, tentative, like this is something serious. 

Michael just cocks an eyebrow, and stares at him some more, because he can’t tell if this is Luke’s poor attempt at diversion or if he’s just really concerned on whether he’s allowed to eat some of the food he’s bought with his own money. Eventually, though, he must decide that it doesn’t matter either way, and he opens the bag, sitting on Michael’s bed. Michael stays exactly where he is, even if it means Luke has to sit on the edge of the bed so they’re not touching. It’s his bed, Michael figures.

He takes one, and it tastes so funny. 

“Last time I ate this, I was with my best friend,” Michael notes, raising his eyebrows.

Luke half-smiles. “Ah, well, one time your rightful Order best friend, next time a Chaos witch. Just the cycle of life I guess,” he takes another, and raises it to his face, contemplating the candy. Then he takes it in one bite, like a dog. Michael thinks it’s sort of amusing to watch, and shakes his head with a small smile.

“Actually, I’m pretty sure he sold me out to his sister, who ended up being responsible for my arrest. I’m not sure these gummy worms even bring me that much of good memories anyway,” he shrugs, sighing and rolling to the side so he can lie on his back. He takes a handful from the bag this time, and stares at the ceiling. “Think he hates me now.”

“Hates you for who you are, or for what you represent?” Luke asks him, quietly.

Still looking at the ceiling and its weirdly dark stains that look like coffee, Michael snorts. “You don’t care about my friend. You’re asking me if I hate you for being Chaos.”

Like he’s been caught in an embarrassing lie, Luke rolls his eyes, and Michael can hear the snort, the murmur of _shut up_ , but when Michael sighs softly and keeps staring up, Luke finds he has no choice but to ask. “Do you?” 

He knows he’s said he did, but that was when he’d first met Luke. And it’s sort of pathetic, he guesses, that in less than a week locked in a bubble-like hotel room, something would change. But hate is a strong word, and one that he has a hard time applying to someone who’s shown him so much kindness. Against all odds, but still. “No.”

Luke pauses, and for a second there, Michael thinks he hasn’t heard it, or maybe just doesn’t care. But then he breathes in like he’s remembering something important, and, says: “Don’t hold that against him. Family should always come first.” 

It takes him a minute to connect the dots, that Luke’s talking about Calum again.

What a fucking joke.

Thinking of Daryl, Michael snorts. He wishes the made up memories of things that never happened between John Gordon and him were true. He wishes he could still call those fake memories an anchor, but he just can’t. Sometimes when he was still young enough to believe in sheer force of will, he’d fantasize that Karen was wrong, and John Gordon truly was his father. Truly loved him, but had to go. Truly loved him, but was killed in the war that the evil Chaos witches brought upon them all, because they were too thirsty for power.

Closing his eyes for a second, he sighs softly. 

Everything is a fucking joke.

Then he opens his eyes, looks at Luke staring out the window again, eating the candy in complete silence, and what he’s said really sinks in. Michael clears his throat a bit awkwardly, shifts to the side so Luke can sit properly if he wants to. Luke doesn’t seem to have noticed the shift underneath him in the mattress.

“What happened to Jack?”

Luke turns to him, blinks a couple of times, as if Michael’s pulled him out of a daydream. He half-smiles. “Lame magick, just like me. In theory, it’s cool: electric manipulation. But in reality it’s not much. All he can do is sum small amounts of shocks. Not much of a witch, but he’s one hell of an engineer,” he smirks, proudly, and Michael finds himself interested, raising his eyebrows with a vague smile, too. Luke adds, like a secret: “He’s the one who gave me the goggles. Nobody else has them like I do, because he keeps putting off the release of the models, and even though Daryl’s kind of pissed, he’s got other things to worry about, so he forgets, and the goggles are still only mine.”

Bending the pillow behind his head so he can look at Luke better, he chuckles. “I was wondering about that. They’re nice, I guess. Cool that your brother did that for you.”

Something sparkles in Luke’s eye almost immediately as Michael says that. Too fast, like he doesn’t realize how big he is, he stands up, almost lets the bag of gummy worms fall but catches it in time. He shoves it in Michael’s general direction, and Michael holds the bag with a frown, slowly putting another one in his mouth. Then Luke runs to his bag, finds the briefcase, and goes through it until he’s coming back to Michael’s bed with the goggles in his hands. This time, when he lands in a rush, he sits closer to Michael, close enough that his knee touches the outer part of Michael’s thigh. Michael notices, and it makes him feel a little hesitant, like maybe he should move away. But Luke’s got an excited smile on his face, so Michael says nothing.

“Here,” Luke says, handing Michael the goggles.

“What?” he frowns, speaking with his mouth full.

“Put them on,” he instructs, rolling his eyes, as if that much is obvious.

Truth is, the reason he takes a deep breath and pretends to be chewing for longer than he is, is because he can hear Karen’s voice in his head, telling about Chaos technology, about how it isn’t like human technology at all. Human and Order technology can go together, both depend on science and nature, and when combined, can accomplish great things, like medication that would be otherwise unheard of, and antidotes to so many different poisons and venoms.

Poisons and venoms that the Chaos keeps creating. Because their technology isn’t based on what Order technology is. It’s one thing to hear about Jack’s engineering, praise it absentmindedly without giving it much thought. But to have something like Luke’s goggles right in front of him and being invited to try them on, it’s just. It’s mixing with Chaos.

Karen’s voice in his head doesn’t approve.

But Karen always refused to accept that he was part Chaos, too.

“Alright,” Michael takes another deep breath, pulling himself up to sit. Once he does, he and Luke aren’t touching at all anymore, and that’s when Luke’s eyes go down, to where his knee was meeting Michael’s thigh. It’s just a split second, and he could’ve imagined it, but then Luke’s insistent eyes are on him, and Michael’s hands are on the goggles.

Proper bronze makes it heavier than it looks. Michael studies it in his hands for a second, but it looks like any pair of goggles would look like. He clicks his long nails to the glass, and it’s thick, but that much was a given. He weighs it in his hands, curious and quiet, and maybe he would’ve for much longer, but Luke’s not a patient one. Luke nudges his arm wordlessly and Michael snorts, shaking his head, but sighing in surrender. 

He puts the damn thing on.

And when he opens his eyes again, everything is different.

It isn’t like when his eyes roll back. It isn’t like that at all. The world isn’t prettier and made of vibrating molecules. The world is made of intense colors, red and blue and yellow and green, and it makes him frown almost immediately, tilting his head to the side as if it’ll start making sense that way. In front of him, it doesn’t look like Luke. It looks like a mess of vibrant colors that don’t vibrate by themselves. But he still sees Luke smile, through all that confusion that he can’t identify.

“They show body heat,” Luke tells him. “Everything black is untouched.”

Michael feels his jaw drop a few inches. It feels so mesmerizing, once you get used to it. It’s true, though, ceiling and walls are all unimportant black, and Luke’s made of green and red and yellow. Michael laughs quietly, and raises one hand to eye level. His hand looks the same as Luke, a mess of too bright colors, but steady, unchanging, which he isn’t used to. When his eyes are rolled back, everything moves all the time, molecules that keep rolling in sync, even when it’s dead matter of inanimate objects.

“Is it always like this?” he asks, still staring at his hand, facing his palm.

Luke shakes his head. “When you touch, it gets redder. Like blood in your cheeks if you’re embarrassed of something,” Luke shrugs. 

“Like blood--what?” he scoffs.

He hears the heavy sigh of impatience, and then Luke’s touching his hand.

His hand still held up in front of the goggles, Luke touches the back of his hand. Michael holds his breath, so much that it feels that his lungs won’t take it and he’ll explode. And then there’s a pause, Luke’s fingers slowly falling to place between Michael’s, and sure, he sees what Luke had meant. Through the goggles, he sees his skin get redder where it was just yellow before, and the tips of Luke’s fingers are the color of lava against his palm.

He can feel it, too. The heat from Luke’s hand on his.

Then Luke retrieves his hand, says: “Like this,” and shrugs.

Michael breathes out, tries not to make it sound heavy, but isn’t sure what it sounds like at all. He takes the goggles off, and blinks a couple of times to try and adjust himself to the different world. He presses his lips together, staring down, fingers tracing the leather of the goggles, and his breath is still a little weird.

“It’s really cool,” he says, as an after-thought. Luke takes the bag of candy from where Michael left them on the bed, and resumes to eating. It’s a bit unnerving, the following seconds, so he forces himself to say something else: “What were you going to say, before?”

Luke takes a deep breath, lets out a bit of a laugh, like he thinks that’s lame, but says what’s on his mind anyway. “I was just thinking that I can’t keep pretending like you’re still on the Order stuff. It’s finally out of your system, which makes you stronger, too. Plus it’s been a few days. I can’t keep the lie much longer, not if I want to save Dylan and Ashton, and I know Halsey and Geordie want to, too.”

Michael has nothing to contribute to that, so he takes another handful of gummy worms.

* * *

He’s skipping class with Calum by the street ramps, and it’s just a little past his fifteenth birthday, maybe not three full weeks. Calum gave him nice presents, an expensive T-shirt from a band he likes, plus a little bottle of hair dye, to encourage him to bleach his hair green like he’d been meaning to. None of them skate, though, so there’s a lot of sitting around and just watching, but Calum always says that they’re learning by osmosis, which Michael thinks is absolutely ridiculous, but rolls with anyway. 

The sun is too much, so he’s got a hat on, one of Calum’s, one with something written in Swedish that he couldn’t read out loud for the life of him, but then again, neither could Calum. It’s a present from one of Mali-Koa’s travels, meeting important Order witches all over the globe in the name of the military, or something like that. Karen tells him to stay out of it.

“Guess what,” Calum says, raising his eyebrows and pulling his feet up on the old wooden bench so he can sit cross-legged. “Dad’s not coming to the Father’s Day homeage thing that Mali invited him to, that ceremony thing her boss is throwing. Honestly, I think it’s bullshit, all these ceremonies, a bunch of people playing weird instruments, dressing up too much and stuff. But it was important for Mali, and father of the year isn’t attending,” he rolls his eyes.

Michael looks at him, parts his lips, but no sound comes.

Then Calum meets his eyes, and murmurs, “Fuck,” and then shakes his head. “Shit, Mike, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be whining about Dad when you… when your father’s passed away. I’m so sorry, that was so insensitive,” he sighs. A bit nervously, he adds, with a chuckle: “Mum would be furious if she’d heard me.”

Michael chuckles too, only his sounds sad and faded. Not for the reasons Calum thinks, but it works either way, and gracefully, he keeps on playing his part. “It’s alright, you don’t have to watch yourself when you’re talking to me. You can whine about your dad all you want,” he shrugs. 

And Calum gives him a look, like he couldn’t possibly imagine himself in Michael’s shoes. Michael snorts, looking down, because he’d like to see Calum try anyway.

“Sorry,” he insists, and Michael just raises his shoulders once more, because it’s pointless trying to tell him that it’s okay. Then, after a pause, again distracted with the older boys skating on the ramps: “I just wish he and Mum were more present, you know? They’re always so busy with the Council that they keep missing all the important stuff. For me, like, I don’t mind so much. I understand that they’re busy, and I understand that they have the most important jobs, and that demands a lot. But Mali… can I tell you something, bro?”

He looks back at Michael, searching his face for something. 

“Sure.”

Calum presses his lips, like he’s not sure he found what he needs to, but trusts Michael with his secret anyway: “I think Mali hates the military. I think she hates it all. I think the only reason she enlisted was so she could hopefully make Mum and Dad proud, and I’m fucking terrified I’ll end up just like her. Sometimes, I don’t even think our parents like being in the Council, either. But other people before them decided they were trustworthy enough, and I guess if you say yes once, you can’t go back on that. No trial time to decide if you’re really fit for the job,” he snorts, raising his eyebrows with a sad smile.

Taking a deep breath, he touches his best friend’s shoulder. “You won’t become Mali, or your parents. You’re your own person. There’s more to who we are than our parents and their bad choices, okay?”

Like he may be convinced for now, Calum nods quietly, looking back to the skaters.

Michael doesn’t tell him it’s a lie. The reason they’re alive is their parents’ bad choices. 

Michael doesn’t trust Calum with his secret.

* * *

“Do you ever feel claustrophobic in here?”

“Sometimes. But I can leave. It’s different with you, I suppose.”

“But you very rarely leave. You’re always here.”

“Would you prefer to be alone?”

“What I mean-- Ah, just forget it.”

* * *

Karen can manipulate water.

Michael’s earliest memory is when he’s either two or three years old, definitely not older than four, sitting on her lap in the garden of their house in the village. She’s got her eyes rolled back and pure white, one of her hands wrapped around his little waist, the other gesturing wildly in the air as the water from the fountain close to them changes course. It lands on Michael just softly enough that it makes him giggle so hard he falls back on her lap, giggling even harder when he falls, and then she adjusts him again safely in her arms, where they can keep playing in the water.

He doesn’t remember the images, or the giggling. That was her filling the blanks for him and his child memory. What he remembers is a feeling of love so overwhelming that it could make him cry.

It’s his earliest memory, and he doesn’t have any memory where he feels as loved as then.

* * *

As the sunset comes, the heavy rain comes back. Michael keeps catching Luke staring out the window with a frown. The angle of the wind doesn’t make it so it rains inside, but Michael sort of wants to ask Luke to close the window. Not because he minds, but because a shadow passes Luke’s eyes every time he frowns and looks out, ignoring Michael.

One in each bed, they’ve spent most of the afternoon playing twenty questions. 

There’s a joke in there somewhere, about the Chaos witch and the neither witch, snorting with the absurdity of choosing long dead celebrities or kitchen utensils for a game for long travels with the night road and nothing to do to keep yourself awake. Michael doesn’t mind it, though, the game. It was Luke’s suggestion, but he’d begrudgingly admit, if persuaded, that he likes it enough. It kills time, and if anything, it gives his worried mind a break, not talking about anything serious for hours in a row. If he pretends Luke is Calum, this could almost feel like the vacation of three years ago, when he spent one night in the next town with Calum while Karen and Calum’s parents were out in a congress, and then having drinks until it was too late, coming back to the hotel drunk and arguing loudly. 

But Luke didn’t watch any of the cartoons he and Calum did, and though he went to school in theory, he hardly ever attended. When Michael asks him about it, about how the hell does he not know even the basics of Trigonometry, Luke explains that Chaos witches have to pass as Order in school, and as they get older and some classes start to get focused on magick development, they all have to drop out. 

Eventually, when Luke again stops asking Michael the questions to find out what he’d chosen -- this time, it was goggles, because he’d thought maybe it would be funny --, because he’s staring out the window, sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, Michael clears his throat. He’s lying on his side, wrapped tightly against the blanket he’s more or less stolen from Luke, and he’s got the motel quilt on top of the blanket and him, too.

Luke looks at him with raised eyebrows. “Sorry, how many questions left?”

“Can you close the window,” he half-asks, half-says. “I’m cold.”

It’s not entirely a lie, but mostly he doesn’t like what the heavy clouds and rain do to Luke’s face. Either way, Luke just nods quietly, like he’s sort of seen it coming, and gets on his knees to move to the window and close it. He’s pulling the shutters, and Michael clears his throat again, feeling slightly more awkward this time.

“So, um, it’s been five days. For how long are you going to tell them that I’m sleeping?”

It takes him a moment to reply, sitting on his knees and staring at the closed window for a second. He sighs, and Michael can tell that his shoulders have gone stiff. He narrows his eyes, tells himself his instincts are a thousand years in delay, and he should probably be scared of him and his silences, but he isn’t. There’s something, though, and after almost a week, he guesses it wouldn’t be past him to say that he’s a little bit concerned.

Then his shoulders rise in a half-shrug, and he’s turning to him with a cocked eyebrow. “Guess you’re right. No point in postponing the inevitable.”

Snorting, Michael snuggles closer to his blanket, face buried in the pillow and then back where it was, resting on the side, looking at him with an amused expression but a reticent tone of voice. “That sounds awfully dramatic.”

Luke parts his lips, then rolls his eyes and falls back against the mattress with a thud. Michael keeps looking at him, with raised eyebrows, and Luke just shrugs again, and then groans. “I just… I figured if maybe I could pretend like you hadn’t woken up, I could buy myself some time, try to figure out a way to make myself useful. But I’m not.”

He doesn’t need his Order magick to tell that the atmosphere’s changed.

Still he tries for a half-smile. “C’mon, I’m sure Daryl has a thousand evil plans that you can help him out with. Doesn’t he have some other bastard son in the northeast, who you can kidnap and then share gummy worms with?”

Maybe if his tone hadn’t been so playful, Luke wouldn’t have snorted and then laughed so much. He isn’t really sure what sets him off, but then Luke’s burying his face against the quilt of his bed, shaking his head until he’s rolling, lying on his back in the bed, and Michael has a smile on his face watching that. It’s the dumbest thing. 

It’s just that Luke’s so bad at this -- this thing of being the Chaos witch that Michael grew up learning to be afraid and spiteful of. He supposes he’s also good at following his Mum’s instructions of being disgusted of Chaos in all situations.

Sighing heavily and dramatically, Luke finally turns so he’s looking at Michael. “There’s only you. Asked around, and apparently they wouldn’t give me the job. Must come with prophecies, says the ad on Craigslist.”

Michael snorts, and laughs, too.

It’s so stupid, but he does. He laughs at that.

They’re quiet for a moment, looking at each other.

Michael wants to say something, but he doesn’t know what. It’s that awful lump in his throat, telling him there’s something to be said, and his eyes must show that urge, because Luke doesn’t break eye contact. But it never comes, whatever it is, so Luke speaks first.

“You never asked how I knew you could open that hole in the wall.”

“I did not.”

“Daryl told me all about your magick before I properly even learned mine,” he says, and his tone is suddenly serious, like he hadn’t been joking about it all a second ago. Suddenly, he looks so much older, like someone Michael wouldn’t recognize even if his life depended on it. It occurs to him, as he looks back at Luke, that maybe it’s always been a matter of life and death for Luke, to learn to recognize him. “I don’t know how he knew, but he did. He knew about your Order magick, and about your Chaos magick. So I knew what to expect.”

And then comes the confession, which maybe was stuck in his throat all the time, but still wasn’t what he needed to say a moment ago. It’s still something he’d wanted to tell someone ever since he found out about it. Michael presses his lips together briefly, and looks away from him for just a second before he’s locking eyes with Luke again.

“I’m so fucking scared of it. My magick.”

Luke blinks a couple of times, like he doesn’t follow. Michael sighs.

“My Chaos magick, obviously. I don’t have any issues with my Order magick.”

Still, the confusion doesn’t leave Luke’s face, and it’s a bit unnerving. He snorts, rolls his eyes, got that little amused smile on his face as he rolls back so he’s not facing him anymore, so he’s on his back, too, staring at the ceiling because the ceiling doesn’t frown at him like he’s talking nonsense. 

“Is this going to be like the eye thing? You tell me something I’ve always hated is awesome, or?”

He’d half-expected Luke to laugh. Actually, scratch that, he’d full-on expected Luke to laugh. But he doesn’t. Michael hears the shift in the mattress, and when he turns to look at him, Luke’s coming his way. He just frowns in confusion as a very serious Luke nudges him so he moves to the side to give him space, and then sits next to him.

“Okay, just one question before I do it. How many times have you used it?”

Pulling himself up to sit, he stares. “Before you do what?”

“How many times?” he insists, impatient.

Michael frowns. “Three. And you saw two out of three, so.”

Luke gives him a look he can’t read. And then holds Michael’s hands, pulling them to his lap.

And Michael blinks slowly, staring at their hands together, not knowing what to do with that.

Before Luke came along, everyone who’s ever touched him was with the sole purpose of hurting him, and that lasted for a very long time. When he did come along, Michael didn’t know what to make of it, just like he doesn’t know what to make of Luke now holding his hands, but one thing is true: he’d never hurt him, or at least not on purpose, or at least not over the course of these five days. So Michael can’t help but feel his stomach do flips as Luke touches his hands and pulls them to his thighs, can’t help the blushing on his cheeks or holding his breath. 

The part of him that’s a hundred per cent loyal to his mother feels guilty about this. He should feel scared, yank his hands back, shove him away and yell. But those shoulds are so far from being truth that guilt is the most that they get him, but not any action.

Even then, they haven’t properly touched much at all. The warmth of his hands is almost inebriating, and Michael sort of wants to close his eyes, touch back, just so he feels an alive presence touching him without the intention to hurt. But Luke’s insistent eyes are on him, so he makes himself look away from their hands, and clearing his throat for the third time in the past ten minutes, he looks back at Luke’s eyes.

He’s staring, atypically patiently. 

“What?” Michael asks, or grunts, or something. But still doesn’t yank his hands back.

“I need to ask you something else, actually.”

“What,” he repeats, this time more of a statement than a question. He looks away.

“When I unlock the bracelet, are you going to try and hurt me?” 

Michael’s shoulders fall, and he parts his lips, but no sound comes immediately. He does try to make himself speak, ask what the fuck is he talking about with this talk about unlocking Michael, or saying that he’d even forgotten about the bracelet, because it’s true. Or again insist that he could lie anytime he chooses, even if Luke doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of lying very well. But instead all he can bring himself to do is snort, and be honest.

“I don’t know. If you’re going to make me use my magick, I just don’t know.”

Luke squeezes Michael’s hands, but Michael still doesn’t hold back. All he does is set his jaw and take a deep breath. “But do you want to? That’s all I need an answer to.”

The corner of his mouth goes up. He can’t stop that, either. He gives Luke a long look, entertained -- which is his word of preference -- by the way Luke’s frown gives him away, how serious he looks, how he’s absolutely clueless to the answer, and anything could surprise him. It’s maybe out of a little bit of cruelty that Michael takes his time with replying, but it’s just that Luke’s sucking on the metal ring around his lip so hard, and Michael can’t for the life of him understand.

“What do you think?” he chuckles.

Luke shrugs, and his frown grows deeper. “I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

With a soft smile, he shakes his head. “No, Luke, I do not want to hurt you.”

Nodding only once, Luke blinks and his eyes are all black. Michael tries to stare, see if he can catch any details he hadn’t seen before because he was caught off guard and didn’t see the chance coming, but Luke quickly lowers his head, and Michael takes advantage of Luke not looking at him to roll his eyes and drop his head back, because he’s such an idiot. Luke wasn’t holding his hands. He was holding his wrists, and in the process, only sort of catching his hands. 

Sliding his finger all around the bracelet, it follows his finger like a magnet made of water. It looks liquid, shapeless and attracted to Luke’s skin, and then Luke lets go of his hands, Michael awkwardly pulling them back to his lap as he watches Luke raise his hand to his eye level, and then the the bracelet falls to his palm. 

Luke blinks in blue again, and smirks, showing Michael what he’s got in his hand.

A paper clip, with three white gems too big for it, but still being held gracefully.

Michael barely looks at the thing. He just likes the look of pride in Luke’s eyes as he presses the paper clip to the sleeve of his shirt, keeping it there. He thinks maybe Luke catches him looking, because he clears his throat like he may have something else to say, when what he says is: “Ready?”

Not really. 

“Yeah.”

He swallows back his nervous heart, and stares down at his own lap, as he shifts positions to sit cross-legged. Luke just waits for him, doesn’t rush it as Michael takes deep breaths to try and remind himself that this is okay. He almost wants to ask if he’s really allowed to use his magick after so long; five days with the bracelet and he’s already hesitant to call his magick back to him, even Order magick, because he doesn’t know what he’ll get.

But then he straightens his back and closes his eyes.

Room 93 is safe. Here, nothing can hurt him.

And he calls it back to him, until he feels magick tingling his fingertips, running up his veins, making his chest go up and his head tilt back as he detaches from who he is, and at the same time, comes into contact with whom he’s always been.

He opens his eyes, and the world is different. 

Back then, that day at the Order Prison, when he’d used his magick with Luke just behind him, fighting off guards to give Michael time to open the damn hole in the wall, he took strength and focus from heaven knows where. But this is different. This is calm and quiet and he doesn’t have any trouble focusing. What he sees in front of him is void getting mixed with stars, which is a silly way to put it, he’s never thought of molecules as stars before. But the way Luke makes it sounds like when he talks about his eyes, it could also be true for what he sees when his eyes are open. 

Maybe Luke’s vibrating blue molecules are stars, and all the nothingness embracing them both is the universe. Maybe the dead white molecules spiraling in all the inanimate objects are like supernovas, and the warmth that comes from Luke’s chest is a shooting star.

It’s his Order magick: he feels things around him in an enhanced way. 

All the pain and all the beauty, just through magnifying lenses. 

It never comes just with his eyesight, though; once he calls the Order magick to him, it’s everywhere. Tingling in his toes, the constant question mark in the air about tomorrow, and whether they’ll even make it that far, and Luke’s heart beating fast and out of focus as Michael stares at him in the eye with his real eyes, he feels those heartbeats like quiet whispers in his ears.

“You’re agitated,” he says, almost in a murmur.

He doesn’t hear very well the surface world when his eyes are rolled back. But even Luke’s distant chuckle is heard, because his response is important: “I’m fucking mesmerized.”

And he can’t really keep his eyes rolled back for much longer, because his focus dissipates. He snorts, closing his eyes, and when he opens them again, they’re green. He feels his face flustered, but Luke’s still giving him that look, eyes big and smile vague on his lips, so Michael rolls his eyes and gives him a little shove on the shoulder, even if he has to move forward for that, and it catches Luke off guard, and he almost, almost loses balance and falls backward. 

“What did you do that for?!” Luke asks, choking on a laugh, as he straightens himself to sit again, this time cross-legged, right in front of Michael.

“You were--!” he says, because it’s the best he can come up with. 

Luke raises his eyebrows, apparently very amused. “Leaving you speechless with my honesty?” he tries. Michael flips him off, because he feels hotter in the cheeks, and stares, as if daring him to say something else. But he doesn’t care much for Michael’s threats of middle fingers and frowns, and goes on. “I mean it, though,” he blinks away the joke, smiling. “It’s beautiful.”

“I don’t know what to say to that,” he looks away, biting back a smile, and he’s a little embarrassed, feels a couple of years younger than he is; wants to reach for the blanket and maybe cover himself on it and see if Luke goes away if he pretends to fall asleep.

Shrugging, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, he says: “Just say thank you.”

“Huh,” he frowns. He hadn’t really thought of that. “Thanks?” he tries. It tastes weird in his tongue, he decides, but Luke shrugs again, so he moves on. “That’s Order, though. I don’t really have any problems with Order.”

“So let’s see some Chaos,” Luke smirks.

The rain falling outside is getting heavier and heavier, and now the wind must’ve changed, because the rain is hitting the shutters of the window, giving them some background music to Michael as he presses his lips closed and stares down at his lap. His fingers starfish on his thighs, and his breaths start to shallow. He feels a little stupid, just his breaths and the rain, but Luke’s quiet and patient, and that’s a side of him he didn’t think he’d see so soon. The patient side, that is, because he can get quiet awfully often. 

“You’re freaking me out,” Michael chuckles nervously.

Looking up at him, he sees Luke’s fond smile of surprise. “Why’s that?”

“Because you’re just there. Sitting and waiting.”

Snorting, Luke blinks, and his eyes turn all black. Michael holds his breath when he first looks at his eyes, and then Luke’s taking the black metal from around his lips. Touching the circle so it turns into an arrow, thoughts shaping matter, Luke blinks again, and offers the black arrow to Michael. Michael stares at it, takes it in his hands, but isn’t sure what to do with it.

“Change it any way you like. I can change it back later.”

“Think you’re missing the point here a little bit,” Michael cocks an eyebrow, studying the solid black arrow in his hands. “I can’t just think and make it so.”

Luke shrugs. “Try.”

So he does.

He closes his eyes again, and calls magick until he can feel it reaching him. But he isn’t calling his Order, and it’s a little weird, feeling it start his way and then back down for something else. It’s like he can feel something licking at his ankles but never going any further, and then there’s the wind inside his head, stronger than it’s ever been, and he feels a shiver making his shoulder blades reach back, almost as if they could touch each other, and his head hurts. It pounds, something making his throat taste bitter as he holds that piece of metal in his hands, and his heart is hammering in the room, louder than the rain could ever be.

To no one’s surprise, when he opens his eyes again, he doesn’t see Luke as he is on the outside, but as he is on the inside. The constellations of his molecules and the tiny smirk on his lips as he stares, but the Order’s repressed so the Chaos can shine, so he raises the straightened piercing to his eye level, looking at it for a moment, to the vibrant dead supernovas, and he’s connected to it.

Michael gasps, then chuckles. He can feel the solidness of the metal in his fingertips even as it’s lying useless on his palm, can taste the metal in his tongue just like blood, can feel the silent whispered vibration of it in his heart.

With one hand hovering over the first holding the arrow, he bends his fingers slowly, as if they were reaching to grab something. His eyes stare at the arrow, watches as it bends, too, awkward and abrupt, no smoothness that makes it look like liquid, like when Luke manipulates it. Instead it’s rough and angled, and when he blinks his eyes back again, the piercing is in a more triangular shape than circular, but it’s still changed.

And it hasn’t exploded.

Michael’s fingers are shaking, so he shoves the piece of metal back at Luke, and Luke wordlessly turns it back to what it was, and fixes it where it belongs, around his bottom lip. Michael’s still staring at his thighs, breathing in and out, trying to calm his breath and heart.

He can still taste the metal in his tongue, the solidness of it in his bones.

“How did that feel?”

Michael raises his eyes to meet Luke’s, and he thinks maybe that’s the wrong question. He’s sure Luke should talk about what he did instead. Either mock him for not being able to make the ring return to its original shape, or congratulate him for not blowing it up. Michael sort of feels like it’s an accomplishment that he hasn’t hurt Luke, because for a split second, he was convinced that he would. Just because of how badly he wanted not to.

Taking a deep breath, he stares down at his hands, but the skin isn’t tearing and there’s no blood anywhere, except for maybe in his mouth. The metallic taste is so strong and heavy that it makes him a tiny bit nauseated, but with his eyes focusing on the surface of the world, the rain hitting the shutters is enough to distract him from that, and he clears his mouth.

“Challenging,” he says, shrugging. 

“But you were in control,” Luke reminds him, voice quiet and serious. 

Michael chuckles. “I guess.”

“Yeah,” Luke smiles, brief and with his thoughts elsewhere. 

There’s a thin chance he’ll maybe work out the nerve to ask Luke to do the thing with his lip ring, the one Michael saw him do with the lights off when he first woke up. With the straight arrow curling and uncurling easily, in neon colors that made Luke’s hands bright in the dark of the room. That moment, right there, he thinks, is when he gave in and decided he’d just believe everything Luke said. If Chaos magick could do something so breath-taking and beautiful, then maybe it was true that everything he knew about the world was wrong.

But instead of giving him the window for that request, Luke tilts his head to the side just a bit, looking at him. “Do you need anything?”

Michael blinks a couple of times, staring. “Do I need anything,” he states, repeating.

“Yeah,” Luke frowns. “Like the gummy worms? If you leave, even to go to the convenience store, and even though I think you’d love Elizabeth,” he rolls his eyes with a half-smile, “well, if Halsey or Geordie saw you, they’d know I was lying about you sleeping. But I can get you things if you want them. Like, food, or something,” he shrugs.

“Well,” he starts, raising his shoulders, too. “I’d kill for a toothbrush, to be honest.”

Luke slaps his forehead. Actually, honest-to-God slaps his forehead.

On instinct, Michael reaches his hand to stop him, with a frown on his face. Luke barely notices it, or Michael’s hand on his wrist, or how Michael looks like he’s holding his breath as he pulls back. “Of fucking course,” Luke says with a laugh. “That was so dumb, that I didn’t offer before. I have toothpaste, though!” he smiles, like that’s something to be proud of. Michael just chuckles. “You’d kill, you said?” he cocks an eyebrow, smirking.

“I-- that was just an expression. Luke, I won’t kill anyone,” he states, slow and careful. But Luke laughs. He was joking. That was Luke joking. Michael just stares, murmurs, more to himself than to Luke: “God, you’re so weird.”

Unoffended, Luke stands up from Michael’s bed, and goes to his. He finds his booths and puts them on, and again it doesn’t look quite right with the sweatpants, or his jacket on top of the oversized T-shirt. Michael has this vague smile on his lips, watching Luke take off the jacket and go through his things with a frown, until he finds a hoodie, and then struggles to put the jacket on top, while trying to pull the hoodie to cover his head.

It’s entertaining enough that he only realizes that Luke’s got an umbrella in one of his hands when he’s already on the way to the door.

“Wait, what the fuck,” he says, a bit too loud. And Luke stares at him, searching the room with his eyes for clues of what he may have done wrong. Michael shakes his head, sighing, the shadow of smile still on his lips. “Not _now_ , Luke. It’s raining a lot. I’m pretty sure I can go a bit more without brushing my teeth.”

Luke cocks an eyebrow. “Nonsense. I can get you that toothbrush. It’s just rain,” he says the last word and then pauses, and his voice is a little weird. He sounds different and reticent, like there may be more to it, but then he’s shaking his head again, chuckling. “No, seriously, plus I want a chocolate or something. You know what? I’ll buy four.”

“You really don’t have to go now.”

“I want to.” And somehow, he says it in a way that rhymes with: _I need to._

It doesn’t make any sense to him, leaving in the pouring rain to get something that could wait, but Michael decides against arguing, just because of the look in Luke’s eyes. He still lets himself look away and frown, lips parted with an argument, but he doesn’t think it’ll sound reasonable at all if he tells Luke he might catch a cold. Luke doesn’t really strike him as the type who would care.

So he just ends up reluctantly nodding, and saying: “Careful, then.”

Luke snorts. “What’s there to be careful about? It’s just rain,” he repeats, and this time, he sounds completely normal, or completely normal by Luke standards anyway. He winks.

Which is how Michael knows he’ll go anyway, no matter what he says.

So Michael sighs and nods and wraps himself tighter against the blanket as he watches Luke’s eyes go black for a tiny second as he opens the door, and then he closes it again with a soft click. He shakes his head, and grunts to himself: “Careful? What the fuck.”

Making a face he stands up from the bed, taking the blanket with him, and goes to the bathroom. He’s made up his mind. Even if it rains a bit inside, he’s going to take the clothes that he was in from the prison, and simply throw them out the window. He’d like to burn them, thinks it’s much more symbolic and poetic, but they can’t attract any attention, and anyway, this will do. All he wants is to be rid of them.

The clothes are on the floor next to Luke’s bed and he’s still got the blanket around his shoulders like a cape, and both his eyes are on the shutters, struggling to get it open, when the door clicks open behind him again. He chuckles, shaking his head. “Couldn’t do it, could you?” he teases.

“I suppose I could not,” someone replies, but it isn’t Luke.

His shoulders go rigid, and a shiver goes up his spine. His heart climbs up his throat and he breathes out slowly, carefully, shutting his eyes and trying to bring his magick back to him. But it won’t come. Neither of them will. He closes and opens his eyes three times in a row, but his magick is sick and tired of his negligence and won’t come back to him.

Defeated and with green eyes, he turns back, with his jaw set and his eyes big.

Halsey closes the door behind her, with a cocked eyebrow and unimpressed look.

“Oh, was I not who you were expecting?” she smiles.

And Michael forgets to breathe.


	7. and i'm unforgiven, i'm such a fool to pay this price

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly, you guys make me too happy. thanks a million for your comments, for the support, for the love. ♥♥♥

“I wasn’t trying to run away.”

Michael’s body is rigid and his voice comes out through gritted teeth. His fists are ready for fight even if his magick isn’t. He could probably never take her down, not with the way she narrows her eyes and walks straight for Luke’s bed and the window, snorting as if she doesn’t believe him -- and why would she? She wouldn’t get it. --, and Michael moves away, retreats to his own bed, feeling like he’ll choke if he doesn’t put more space between her and him.

Only she does open the window, and though the rain has thinned, it still comes inside a little bit. Stopping by the window she takes a cigarette from her a pack, a lighter, and lights it right in front of him. 

Michael sits on his bed, and pulls the blanket tighter around him, breathing hard.

She sighs heavily, staring at him. “You’re ruining everything, Michael.”

His stomach sinks, and he tries to make of the blanket a shield, but it doesn’t work. His rebellious magick won’t come back, no matter how hard he calls, how much he begs inside his head. Still it ignores him, and Halsey doesn’t. She only takes a drag of her cigarette, and blows the smoke out the window with her face tilted to the side, but she doesn’t look away from him. Her eyes are cold and make him feel like flinching away.

God, he hates this.

“I wasn’t running,” he says again, making his voice sound harder, stronger. 

But she only scoffs. “Sure you weren’t. Trying to open the window, with no handcuffs, no bracelet, either,” she cocks an eyebrow, pointing in Michael’s general direction. “I bet you’re feeling really stupid right now, knowing he left the door open, too.”

He takes a deep breath. How’s he going to tell her that he wouldn’t do that to Luke? That his freedom means less and less if it means a life will be over, and that life will be Luke’s. He doesn’t. He knows he can’t. Instead he grits his teeth some more, stares back at her like if he does it enough, she’ll have his magick and just _know_ it. 

Halsey takes another drag of her cigarette, and Michael can’t read her, not without his Order magick. She looks serious enough, but her expression is blank, and there’s not giving her away in the way she sits on Luke’s bed with her knees bent and one arm around the windowsill, holding the cigarette between her index and middle fingers. She’s got her vibrant blue hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, and in a jeans jumpsuit and white sneakers she looks like she’s been cropped out from somewhere else and pasted into the ugly motel room. Michael needs her to leave, would yell at her to do so if only he could find his voice.

Still with a raised eyebrow, she tells him: “I don’t like what you’re doing with Luke.”

Snorting, he raises his shoulders. “Just what am I doing with him?”

“You’re using him,” she spits, her face made ugly for a second with disgust. 

And Michael doesn’t know where he takes it from, the rage and the incredulity. The blanket falls from his shoulders as his body jerks forward in a loud snort. He shakes his head, sounds at least ten years older when he says: “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I don’t,” she cuts him off before the next argument, and she’s narrowing her eyes at him again, seizing him up, studying him. “I know your kind. You’re selfish,” she says, in a way so assertive that Michael only blinks and stares, unable to interrupt. She somehow raises, becomes bigger, as she says the next word, punctuating them with her voice getting louder. “You just take, take, take.”

“You don’t know me,” he says, but his bravado is gone, voice faltered and frown on his face covering up for offense instead of coming up with a way to fight back.

Halsey snorts, full of contempt. “You’re using his little crush to your advantage. You know what’s worse? Usually, you’d earn my respect for that. But you’re going to get him killed.”

Is he? Michael doesn’t know. Suddenly, he isn’t so sure anymore.

He frowns and breathes out heavily, and he hates her so much. Right now, he wishes he could access his magick and hurt her. He’s never really wanted to hurt anyone that badly before, not even the people who had him at the prison. But that wasn’t personal. This is. If he could, he’d hurt her, just to get her to stop talking, saying things he doesn’t want to hear.

“He doesn’t have _a crush_ on me,” he says instead, because maybe if he focuses on Luke here, he won’t question himself. 

But Halsey rolls her eyes, unimpressed, and takes another drag of her cigarette. She sounds more tired than angry when she speaks next. “He’s fantasized about meeting you since he was a young kid. What do you think?” Michael just stares at her, unblinking and feeling his head pound, and he’s so cold from the wind coming inside. The rain has thinned, but it’ll get bad again soon. It must, with the heavy rains. There’s that smell in the air. “Anyway, like I said, you’re ruining everything,” she cocks an eyebrow once more, shrugs. She takes a drag and turns her head to the side to blow out the window once more, and then her eyes get lost in the rain for a moment, just like Luke had before. Michael’s body stiffens, and he’s got a sharp tongue getting ready to bark when she makes everything go to shit in his head. She says: “If we get a thunderstorm, he’s going to snap.”

Michael’s frown grows deeper and offended. “He isn’t going to hurt me.”

Halsey looks back at him with raised eyebrows. “You think you’re very important, don’t you?” she scoffs, and Michael just stares back, before she shakes her head a tiny bit. “I don’t care if he hurts you. He’s going to hurt himself.”

It’s like air being punched out of his lungs. He sort of feels like he can’t breathe.

“What the…” 

“It’s the lightnings,” she continues, looking out again, making a face. “He can’t deal with them, not after everything. Starts shaking, sometimes he has seizures. Jack can make it stop, Ashton and Dylan can make it stop, but I could never help with those.”

Michael presses his lips together, wants to ask why, but doubts he’ll get a straight answer.

Instead he goes for the next best thing: “Why are you here?”

“You’re using him, and it’s gross,” she starts, still not focusing on him, throwing the cigarette half-smoked out the window, closing the shutters with a thud. “But he listens to you, so you should tell him to get the fuck out of here, while he still can,” she gets up from the bed, turns to Michael with her head tilted up, rightful and tall. “He should’ve left days ago. Get you to us, then flee before we can do anything about it. Convince him to leave you behind and run away, or when I put a bullet in his head, it’ll be his blood on your hands,” she points at him, as if giving him a tip, and starts out.

And it’s just. It’s too much.

He snorts, stands up too, before she can leave.

“What the fuck?!” he says, and laughs, dryly and nasal. He isn’t sure what makes him stand so tall against her, especially when she tilts her head to the side, watching him like he’s just a pet. But he does. He stands tall and confident of his every word, breathing in this room that’s kept him safe, and saying the only things he’s sure of. “If you hurt him at all, I don’t care what you tell yourself to sleep at night, It’s _your_ doing. Not mine. Not Daryl’s. You’re not some pre-programmed robot who physically isn’t capable of saying no. You do whatever you think is right, and if you think shooting your friend is right, then, well, I can’t stop you,” he snorts.

Halsey pauses, opens her lips and then closes her mouth again. As an after-thought, she says: “He’s not… Luke’s not my friend.”

“Oh, he’s your ally, I’d forgotten,” he cocks an eyebrow, unimpressed and spreading his arms. His voice rises, and then it lowers again, as he continues. “Like I said, you tell yourself whatever the fuck you have to to sleep at night. But you know I’m right.”

There’s a tiny second there, where they stare at each other, that Michael’s sure that he’s gotten through to her. That she’ll listen, nod and say thanks for the pep talk, leave this room with another point of view and ready to take off, leave all of this behind if that’s what would make her happy. But Michael supposes happy is an overly complex concept in a world that’s about to break down in a new war. There’s no room for happiness when your hand will be forced down on a gun and you’ll shoot your friend. Michael may not understand the dynamics of their fucked up relationships, but he does know that neither Halsey nor Luke seem to care much about killing, and yet she went there to try and terrify Michael into doing something about it, so Luke runs and she doesn’t have to do what she’ll end up doing anyway. Not because she has no choice, but because she feels she doesn’t.

Michael does get that much: feeling like you’re at a dead-end.

Somehow, he doesn’t feel like it’s the case for him. Michael’s making a choice by staying. He knows that much.

But she blinks. That’s when he knows she doesn’t care what he has to say.

Her eyes are unblinking and all white. It’s been a while since he’d last seen Order magick that close, and it makes him hold his breath, swallow dryly as he takes a few steps back, but he’s not fast enough for her, couldn’t possibly be. She raises her hand, and slams it, like she’s about to throw something at him, and Michael can only catch with the corner of his eye as the lamp slams first against the wall, and then the smashed metal hoop of the lamp goes straight for his neck.

Michael chokes, coughing as he grabs at it, trying to pull it away.

But the corner of her mouth goes up, and Michael drops his head back, trying to put more distance between them, between the hoop pressing against his throat, but it just presses harder and harder until he’s backed up against the wall.

“Tell him to leave,” she says, her voice oddly sweet to contrast with Michael’s choking sounds. His eyes water, and he tries coughing again, but it only makes it worse. “If he doesn’t leave, you’ll see him die, and know it’s because you ruined everything.”

She moves her hand abruptly again, down this time, and the hoop leaves his neck. Michael breathes in and out heavily against the wall, feeling himself drop a couple of inches as he stares at her. He touches his throat, fingers shaking, skin going red fast, already unused to the abuse. His head pounds like his hammering heart wants to send a message to his whole body, that it’s time to leave, only he should be the one on the run.

His chest going up and down erratically, he only watches as Halsey gives him one last pressed smile, blinks her eyes back to dark green, and then she takes another cigarette from her pack, sticks the pack back in the pocket of her jeans jumpsuit, grabs the lighter with the other hand, With the cigarette between her lips, she opens the door, lights the cigarette on her way out.

And Michael slides down to the floor, hugging his knees and trying to steady his breath.

* * *

“Hey there,” Luke says.

He sounds so excited, Michael raises his head from the pillow with a half-smile. Luke’s closing the umbrella even though it’s drenched and the carpet’s going to smell with where it’s wet. He puts the umbrella in the wastebasket and takes to Michael’s bed a plastic bag. Michael only scoots to the side to give him enough space to sit, but he’s still covered in the blankets up to his shoulders, and trying to look sleepy. 

Luke mostly ignores that, and takes from the plastic bag four Snicker chocolate bars, and a blue and purple toothbrush. It looks expensive, sort of, not the type you’d buy with only cents, so Michael has to raise his eyebrows at that, sighing softly.

“It’s to match your hair, obviously,” Luke rolls his eyes with a small smile, offering him the toothbrush. Michael only moves enough to touch it, and then Luke’s already speaking again. “And I bought chocolate! Do you want some?”

“Actually, just think I’m going to crash for a bit. But thanks for the toothbrush. That was very…” he starts, then pauses. Luke’s still looking at him with lit up eyes and his jacket and hood of the hoodie stained with fat raindrops. “Nice.”

Luke nods, like it’s no big deal, then stands up from Michael’s bed. He leaves two chocolate bars on the floor by Michael’s bed, and then goes to leave his by the tiny nightstand his own pair, and stops. He turns to Michael with a frown. “Where’s the lamp?”

Time is a relative thing. 

He can’t for the life of him come up with a theory of how long it was that Luke spent out, but it was time enough to fix the mess Halsey left behind, or sort of, anyway. He did on the outside. He’s not sure about what the hell is going on on the inside.

“I’m a clumsy asshole,” he shrugs, fingers grabbing the toothbrush in his hands like it’s a weapon he might need to use soon. “I broke it.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Luke answers easily, smiling at him, “don’t call yourself an asshole for that,” he rolls his eyes, and then he’s going back to Michael’s bed. Michael feels his stomach drop a bit, but then Luke’s just taking the toothbrush from his hands. “Going to leave this in the bathroom, okay?”

Michael nods. Okay, yeah, alright.

From the bathroom, Luke asks: “You said you wanted to sleep. You okay if I take a shower, then? Kinda cold. Or will you be bored?”

Taking a deep, deep breath, Michael rolls back so he’s lying on his stomach. He answers a soft: “No problem. Take your shower.” But he thinks of what Halsey said. He thinks of everything she said. 

And Luke deserves better than this.

He deserves better than any of this.

Michael only closes his eyes when he hears the sound of the shower running, and Luke humming under his breath a song Michael’s never heard. Michael half-smiles, and even though the light of the room is still on, Michael closes his eyes, and forces himself back to sleep, with the muffled sound of Luke’s singing voice to lullaby him to another world.

* * *

Once, just once, Michael would like to know what it feels like.

He’s sixteen and his hair is bleached white, and he doesn’t know what to do with the envy making his heart ugly. He presses his lips together and nods to show that he’s listening, and Calum keeps going about it:

“So she said yes. Maddy fucking Harris is going to go on a date with me!” 

He half-smiles, because he’s been half-assing his way through this friendship anyway. He was the one supposed to introduce them, since Maddy wanted it so bad, and Calum’s pretty much had a crush on her since they were thirteen. But it would mean losing one, and then the other, because they’d realize that they don’t need Michael if they have each other.

Michael’s so jealous he could punch Calum in the face.

But he half-smiles and half-pretends to be happy for him. “That’s so cool.”

“I don’t even know where I’ll take her,” he snorts, but he’s still smiling. “I’m thinking of asking Dad for some money so I can take her to a nice restaurant, maybe. I just want to impress her, you know? She held my hand when she said yes. She had the cutest dimples,” he pauses. His teeth sink on his bottom lip, looking at Michael in expectancy. 

This is his time to react, he supposes.

“Ah, dude, that’s really awesome,” he says.

It’s all the encouragement Calum needs to keep going. He goes through every unnecessary detail that Michael could’ve helped him with but didn’t. He tells Michael about how this Leighton guy they both had classes with in Order History 101 last year introduced them, and how this Leighton guy had told Calum that Maddy’s eyes lit up when she talked about him. Michael could tell that it was mutual, just as lamely mutual that it made him feel like he was a bad person to stare and wrinkle his nose at how happy Calum is.

He’s so gone for her, and she’s so gone for him, and Michael’s just there, hanging suspended in a world where he’s pretty much come to terms with the fact that he’ll never be loved. No one can love a half-Chaos witch. If he ever gets close enough to trust the person with his secret, they’ll just end up running scared. 

But Calum? He has everything. He has a future.

Michael blames his father for the bitter taste of envy in his tongue. It must be Chaos.

* * *

There’s a loud thud, and then three more. Michael wakes up with his heart racing, and that’s when he hears the sounds, murmurs, grunts, all unintelligible but familiar anyway. Michael blinks in the dark, jerking his body forward, and he turns to the direction of the window, the sounds of lightnings breaking the silence louder than Luke’s whispers could.

His heart’s at his throat before he can think twice or rub his eyes to force sleepiness to go.

Michael rushes to Luke’s bed, stumbles on Luke’s boots on the floor and swears under his breath. He touches Luke’s shoulder, to try and get him to turn his way.

When Luke does turn, he’s so sweaty that he looks feverish. His eyes are shut tight, and there’s a mantra coming out of his mouth in broken pieces: “No, don’t, don’t,” only it hardly sounds like English at all.

Michael frowns, feels his heart speeding up even more. He squeezes Luke’s shoulders tighter, tells him, “Please, wake up,” but Luke’s agitated, breathing hard, and then another lightning comes, and Luke screams.

Screams, and then turns to the side, away from Michael, so forcefully that it hurts Michael’s wrist and he pulls back with a frown and parted lips. Luke curls into a ball, shaking so bad that when he kicks the blanket away, it slides down from his body. With his lips still parted, he goes back to his mantra. “No, don’t, don’t.”

“Luke,” he says, louder, but it doesn’t change anything.

It freaks him out, Luke in fetal position and sweating hard as he shakes and sobs in his throat start to make him choke. Feeling desperation creeping in, Michael shakes him by the shoulder, says his name louder, stronger, but the rain is too heavy outside, hitting the shutters and making Luke’s shoulders shake away from Michael’s hold.

“Fuck,” he murmurs, and then, louder, pinning him down: “Wake up, Luke!”

Nothing, just more shaking.

Michael’s eyes tear up. Something about this is worse than being in pain himself.

Maybe it’s the helplessness of it all, making his long fingernails sink on Luke’s skin through the T-shirt as he keeps trying to get him to stop shaking, and his voice sounds broken and unlike him when he yells: “Just! Wake. The. Fuck. Up.”

Michael wouldn’t know if it’s because of how hard his fingers are digging against Luke’s already tense shoulders or because of how loud he called him this time, but Luke does open his eyes, and his body jerks forward as he gasps for air, but Michael’s holding him down, pressing all his weight against Luke’s shoulders on his palms instead of even poorly dividing it with the knee brushing Luke’s side. Luke can’t sit up with Michael still pinning him down, staring at him with wide-eyes and through blurry vision, but still then, still in the dark, he can see how terrified Luke’s eyes are as he looks back at him.

He’s afraid that if he lets go, Luke will go right back to his nightmare.

But Luke’s blinking fast and breathing hard, still gasping for air, staring at Michael as if he’s seeing through him, and Michael doesn’t mind being invisible so much. All he cares about is that Luke stops looking like he’s going to be sick. Eventually he closes his eyes and his chest stops rising and going back down so frantically, so Michael reluctantly sits back on his legs, but his hands are still on Luke’s shoulders, just in case.

He sort of feels like he should apologize for hurting him, but he can’t speak.

When the sound of erratic breath doesn’t stop but Luke looks like he’s coming back to reality, Michael’s forced to realize it’s his own breath. He blinks a couple of times, holding his breath to try and slow it down by force, and finally lets go of Luke’s shoulders, one hand sliding down all the way to his wrist, but not daring to go any further.

“You scared me,” Michael manages, quietly.

Luke’s lips are still parted and he’s breathing through his mouth, but when Michael talks, it looks like he’s pulled back all the way, saying goodbye to whatever crawls under his skin when he closes his eyes and the lightnings start outside. Luke licks his bottom lip, shuts his eyes tight for another second, raises the hand Michael isn’t almost touching, and rubs his eyes.

“I scared me too,” he chuckles. 

His heart’s not in it, though. Michael’s still a little scared.

“They gave me shocks, too,” he blurts out, because he can’t stand the silence that comes after. It’s dark enough that he can’t tell exactly what Luke’s face looks like right now, but he thinks he sees a frown. His eyes are still adjusting to the darkness. “They… in the Order Prison, I mean. They had that device thing, looked like a pen? They gave me shocks too, is what I meant.”

Luke takes a deep, deep breath, and for a moment Michael thinks he’s got it right.

Then his apologetic smile tells Michael otherwise.

“It’s not that,” he says, lowly and small, and Michael just looks at him, pressing his lips together and staring back, searching his mind fiercely for something to say to make it right. But just like with Halsey, he can’t. His words can’t fix anything. “But thanks for waking me up,” Luke adds, sounding half-removed from the situation, but only half as chaotic as he usually is. 

He moves his hand away from Michael, and Michael starts retreating his hand with his eyes glancing away and an embarrassed look on his face that Luke probably can’t see anyway, but then he understands. Luke is just moving his hand so he can take Michael’s in his hand.

And this time there’s no way for Michael to tell himself it’s something else.

Luke intertwines their fingers quietly, and Michael stills, holds his breath and finds their hands together in the dark room. Luke’s hand is a little cold and sweaty against his, but he doesn’t mind it so much, just holds it back, and rubs his thumb against Luke’s soothingly.

But he’s still holding his breath.

Michael clears his throat a little awkwardly, ready to say the first thing in his mind just to stop this silence again, this time for different reasons, for his own sake. But Luke just sighs, in a way that sounds both heavy and soft at the same time, somehow, so Michael stops himself. 

“I don’t want to talk about that, but can we talk about something else?” he asks.

It sounds like such a genuine request, that Michael only nods, and keeps rubbing Luke’s thumb with his, because if he stops, he’ll have to think about it, and he doesn’t want to.

“Can you maybe,” Michael frowns, staring down, “like, give me some room, and,” he pauses, again, takes a deep breath, and goes for it: “I could lie here with you.”

Luke doesn’t even say a thing. Instead he just moves as far away from Michael as he can, with his back against the wall, and he waits. Michael half-smiles, feeling his face warm and his chest warmer, but murmurs for Luke to wait a second, and then Michael’s letting go of his hand.

First he gets the blanket Luke’s kicked to the floor, and covers him again. Luke’s quiet, but hums approvingly in either a choke or pure fondness as Michael does it. Michael just chuckles, goes to his own bed, and takes his blanket. And then he goes back to Luke’s bed.

He supposes it’s not the ideal, lying on top of Luke’s blanket with the blanket he’s claimed as his own on top of him, but he still wraps himself around it and lies on the other side of Luke’s bed, sighing softly and looking at him. In the dark, it could almost be that the space between him and the Chaos witch who kidnapped him is inexistent, even though physically, it’s there. But still he breathes in and out and his heart feels calmed.

“Can you tell me something nobody knows?” Luke asks. 

Michael smiles. 

With his voice very quiet, he tells Luke: “I had a piercing once, not like yours, but a bar, right here,” he points at his eyebrow. Luke just nods. “That’s not the part nobody knows, though. I managed to keep it from Mum for about a week, but when she saw it, she got so fucking mad,” he chuckles, dryly. “She told me I looked like some Chaos witch,” Michael rolls his eyes, pauses for a moment, the memory still making him bitter. “I liked it, because it made me think I was different for something other than the obvious that nobody knew, but then she went and ruined it for me.”

He tries laughing, because it feels too heavy of a confession to not laugh it off, but Luke only smiles quietly, and says: “It doesn’t have to stay ruined.”

Michael looks at him, knuckles turning white with how hard he grabs at the blanket, keeping it around him. “How did you get yours?”

“Ah!” he laughs, face lighting up for a moment. “I got it with my friend Dylan. He wanted to get a ring on his eyebrow, and kept teasing me saying I wouldn’t handle the pain, so I had to prove him wrong, of course,” he smirks. “He was just too scared to get a piercing alone, I guess. He does that sometimes,” he rolls his eyes, but the fondness is all there.

He wonders if things would be different, if they didn’t come from the places they did. 

If Luke had been born Order and his family never got ruined by the war, if only Daryl had never met him, and wasn’t Michael’s father, if there was no casualties and their families weren’t part of them, Michael wonders how much different things could be. If maybe Luke and Michael’s friends would get along, and Calum and Luke could get along, too, and maybe nobody would be taken prisoner, and nobody would be thinking about death, and their biggest concern would be the over-the-top prom night by the end of the year.

Michael thinks they’d maybe be friends. Maybe… maybe they would.

“Have you been friends for a long time?”

Luke nods. “Not as long as Dylan and Ashton, though. Ashton and Jack were friends, so I met him and then I met Dylan. But they all used to hang out with Halsey already, so I sort of just,” he shrugs. “I’m the baby of the group,” he rolls his eyes, snorting.

“You’re the baby?” Michael echos, snorting too, smile playing on his lips.

“Just that I’m the youngest, so,” Luke shrugs once more, sucking in his bottom lip.

They’re quiet for a minute or two or ten. Michael doesn’t know. All he knows is that it feels nice, being there, trying to keep himself from moving because he doesn’t want to invade Luke’s personal space, even though he’s already there, in his bed, when he could be in his instead. Luke closes his eyes softly but he keeps breathing as if to show that he’s awake, and Michael studies his face, kind of wants to touch but stops himself, grabs tighter at the blankets instead.

He wants to ask him how come it came to that, that these people he obviously loves are either on the way to die on him or kill him. It’s horrifying, but Michael doesn’t want to disturb the peace in Luke’s face.

“What type of name is Halsey, anyway,” he snorts, tentative.

Luke opens his eyes with a smile on his lips. “Her name was Ashley. But that was when she was Order. She’s Chaos now.” 

Michael tilts his head to the side, raising his eyebrows. “I… I don’t follow. Her magick is Order. She’s born Order. You can’t just… change that,” and then, after a pause, “can you?”

“Order and Chaos are just alignments,” Luke says, sounding serious and older. “It’s dumb to divide people on the type of magick they have. There’s both beauty and tragedy in any power. In her case, she lived enough in Order to know it wasn’t for her, so she sought Chaos, and Chaos found her, too,” he smirks.

“Hypothetically speaking,” Michael starts, slow and glancing away from Luke. Even in the dark, he can tell Luke continues to look at him. “You could turn Order if you wanted?”

He hates the hesitance in his own voice, and how it makes Luke pause, too.

“Doesn’t work both ways,” Luke clears his throat a bit awkwardly, then: “It’d be like a poor person saying they’re tired of misery and want to give the millionaire life a try,” he snorts.

They’re quiet for another moment, and Michael sort of wants to apologize for asking. He’s got one of his hands close to his face, holding the blanket, and with the lights off, it’s like even every movement is slowed down. He can’t feel any shift on the mattress underneath him, but then Luke’s hand is on his, warm and just barely hovering. Michael presses his lips together, and spreads his fingers, so Luke’s can fit between his.

“I don’t want you to leave,” Michael says, finally, like he’s been choking on it.

And Luke chuckles quietly, saying: “I won’t.”

“I know,” Michael sighs, “but you should.”

Luke pauses, again, like he’s finding Michael as confusing as Michael found him just a couple of days ago. With the weight of Luke’s hand on his, it feels really easy to ignore the the consequences of tomorrow. There’s nothing bad coming at all. Room 93 is a forte and no one can take any of them down. It’s an unbreakable bubble and he’s just learning how to make it so he can defend it, too. 

“But I won’t,” Luke insists, and his voice sounds so firm and certain, that Michael’s a bit envious of that, too, of what it means for Luke, of how Michael doesn’t think he’d change his mind even if Michael tried to persuade him otherwise.

Maybe, Halsey is right. Maybe he’s just selfish and taking, taking, taking. But he can’t stop his hand from turning so he can hold Luke’s better, looking quietly at their hands between them in the bed, repressing thoughts of fear to let thoughts of better days come instead.

The rain’s still heavy, but Michael hasn’t heard any more lightnings. 

“What’s in schedule for tomorrow?” Michael asks lowly.

Luke humors him. “Chaos Magick Practice early in the morning. Gotta wake up early.”

Michael chuckles, and his eyes are heavy. He yawns, tilting his head against the blanket to hide his face as he lets out a soft sound of sleepiness. 

“Hey,” Luke asks in a murmur, in secret. Michael raises his eyebrows. “Wanna sleep here tonight?”

He wasn’t planning on leaving.

It isn’t just that he’s relaxed enough that it feels like his muscles weigh so much more, that standing up would be a sin. It isn’t because of how weirdly comfortable he is in keeping to the side of Luke’s bed, careful to not occupy an inch that he doesn’t absolutely need. It maybe has to do with Luke’s hand on his, the warmth insistent contact that he doesn’t want to break. He was planning on just pretending to fall asleep before he did, so Luke would have no choice but to let him.

The thought makes him smile a bit.

“Yeah.”

“Hey,” he asks again, in the exact same way as before. Michael laughs quietly, is about to interrupt him and say that he’s already said that he wants to, but then Luke’s murmur is about something else. “I don’t think Daryl will hurt you.”

And there it is, what Michael had been so successful in forgetting.

It’s not that hard, getting past the fact that Luke rolls his eyes back in black, when Michael’s seen the neon colors he can make silver metal become, when he’s seen bracelets turned to paper clips and metal like liquid licking up his fingers. It’s not that hard admitting that his magick isn’t scary, definitely not half as scary as Halsey, born in Order. Even the scars across his torso and the maniac grin he gets sometimes, even that is not that hard to admit to, when there’s the quiet smile, the kind blueness in his eyes. 

Michael’s more or less coming to terms that Luke is Chaos. 

Daryl is a different story.

Just the mention of him makes Michael’s blood boil. It brings a taste so bitter to his mouth that he finds himself in desperate need to just turn his face away from Luke so he doesn’t see the way he wrinkles his nose like he’s smelling something foul. Daryl is the grown man who went to a twelve year old and manipulated him into shaping his whole life around a dumb prophecy that might’ve not even come true. Michael’s still glad it did, that Luke got to take him out of there, but it isn’t fair. It’s sick. 

Now, he isn’t stupid. He knows Daryl probably protected Luke and Jack because of that. But if he’s such a good leader, then why wasn’t he protecting his people before that? Why was he so busy with the killing when he could’ve stopped families from being torn apart? No one in Luke’s family had to die. It would’ve been better for him, if Daryl had done his job right, and Michael would’ve never met Luke, but Luke wouldn’t be a broken boy playing with a blow-torch and real people.

Michael takes a deep breath, and brings Luke’s hand closer to his face. He rests his hand against the back of his hand, because somehow it feels soothing, and he doesn’t want to go there. He can’t tell Luke that this is all been in vain, and Michael doesn’t care whatever the hell Daryl wants to do with him anyway. If Luke chooses to have any faith in his leader, then so be it, Michael doesn’t care.

“I miss Mum,” he says, instead.

“I miss mine, too,” Luke says.

And Michael feels like Calum must’ve felt every single time he complained about his father when Michael’s was supposedly dead. At least Karen’s alive, and he can’t say the same about Luke’s mother. Or father. Or older brother. And he’s just taken with a sadness so big that he could cry. Not because of how much he misses Karen, but because he knows for him is temporary, and for Luke it’s forever.

Michael just doesn’t want anything that sad to be eternal for Luke.

“I’m sorry,” Michael whispers against the back of Luke’s hand, and presses his lips to his skin. It’s not a kiss, he tells himself, just sympathy expressed physically. 

In front of him, Luke sighs heavily, says, “I’m sorry all the time,” and it sounds so soft, like a whisper Michael wasn’t meant to hear, that Michael presses his lips to the back of Luke’s hand again, squeezing his hand in the process, and it isn’t just sympathy. 

It’s just that he wishes he could fix things for everyone.

He was never much of a fixer, was hardly a half-assed tinker on his best days, but if he could fix one thing, he’d fix Luke. He thinks of maybe telling him that, even though it’d be no use, but when he looks at him, Luke’s smiling in a way that Michael doesn’t understand.

“You don’t hate me at all,” he sing-songs, like little kids do the same, except their version is _You love me_ , and Luke wouldn’t go that far, not even joking. Not hating seems to be enough for him, enough to get him smirking and raising his eyebrows and widening his eyes at Michael in a way that makes him laugh.

“God,” he says, and chuckles.

Luke continues: “Doesn’t hate me, no, not one bit.”

“I literally told you this before, I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal of this,” Michael complains, frowning and pulling Luke’s hand closer to his chest and away from Luke, as if that’s it, he’s stealing it. Halsey’s right and he’s selfish, and he only takes, takes, takes. Took Luke’s blanket and his hand and will take all of him too.

“Yeah, but,” Luke rolls his eyes, and for a flash second, there’s that smile again. The big maniac grin that makes Michael properly laugh, because it’s so out of place and Michael finds himself endeared by it, only this time.

And it occurs to him, maybe Luke doesn’t need any fixing.

“I don’t hate you at all, no, not one bit,” he nods, and Luke’s smile goes back to what it was before, quiet and small and most of all staying. 

Michael wants to ask if he minds the rain, but then again, he also doesn’t want to say anything at all. Right now, all he wants to do is be quiet, and keep Luke’s hand in his, because it’s warm and it feels good, and he thinks maybe he deserves that. 

Screw Halsey. Screw Daryl. Screw everyone else, too.


	8. 'cause i've got a jet black heart, and there's a hurricane underneath it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> massive, massive thank you. this wouldn't be as fun without you. ♥  
> ps: i like to doodle sometimes. [i doodled our witch boys.](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/128564407805/opiamichael-and-opialuke-or-blanketgoggles)

Michael’s first kiss is at two in the afternoon of a boring cloudy Sunday and it makes him feel like trash. The second his eyes close, he knows he doesn’t want to open them again, because that would mean facing what he’s just done.

It’s not the kiss that’s bad, per se.

It’s just everything else.

* * *

There’s that tiny moment between sleep and the state of being awake where it feels like a choice to wake up, even if it’s not. Michael’s somewhere in between these realms of reality and memories from back when his life still felt his, but he feels the solidness against his cheek pulling him to reality. It makes Michael take a deep breath, bury his face in it and away from the light, but the realization that there’s light to start with makes him feel funny, like he isn’t following the script.

He supposes he isn’t, anyway. He knows exactly where he is even before he opens his eyes. He can feel Luke’s arm around his shoulders, knows he’s got his head on Luke’s chest.

Frowning against the light, he opens his eyes. 

The angle doesn’t let him see Luke or tell Luke that he’s awake, but Michael finds he’s got an arm dropped over Luke’s stomach, fingertips brushing against the cold wall on the other side. He’s still not under the blanket, still only under the one he brought from his bed, so they don’t touch much, but it still feels intimate and in his sleepy head, just… normal.

He squints his eyes towards the light. The window is open, it isn’t raining anymore, and with one hand busy around Michael’s shoulders, the other is making a black arrow fly up to the ceiling. Michael half-smiles, quiet and not wanting to let Luke know he’s awake, and tilts his head just a tiny bit, so he can watch the arrow bend and then go down again.

Michael chuckles.

And Luke rubs his shoulder, saying, softly: “Hey, you’re awake.”

“I am,” he says, but he’s still frowning, looking at the arrow.

The arrow free falls to Luke’s palm, and he closes his fist. Once he opens it again, it’s a ring, and Michael just groans and closes his eyes again, grunting in offended tones as Luke moves his arm from around him to fix the piercing around his bottom lip.

“I woke up and you were like this,” Luke says, cautiously, “so I just wanted to make you more comfortable I guess? Plus you were literally lying on my arm and it was hurting me.”

Michael raises his head to look at him, with a silly smile on his lips.

He doesn’t know what about it makes him smile so much.

“I’m going to go brush my teeth,” he says, ceremoniously, and Luke gives him a thumbs-up. Actually, honest-to-God, gives him a thumbs-up. “And take a shower and stuff. Cool?”

He doesn’t know why he asks, either.

But Luke just smiles, bright and big. “Cool!”

* * *

When Michael comes back to the room, Luke’s changed into a sleeveless shirt and shorts, and he’s sitting on the windowsill with his legs hanging outside, and he’s got something in his hands. Something that cries.

For a split second, he thinks Luke’s killing something.

Then he sees Luke’s frown and that he’s petting it. It’s a bird.

In careful steps, as if to not scare either the bird nor Luke, changed into the same sweatpants and T-shirt and the wet towel still over his shoulder, Michael walks to Luke’s bed slowly, resting one of his knees against it as he tilts his head to the side, uncertain.

“Um.”

“His little wing is broken,” Luke says, gravely, and continues to caress the bird’s head as it twists its head to the side, crying out quietly. “I don’t know what to do,” he confesses, sounding hopeless and small.

Michael parts his lips, kneeling on the bed until he’s closer to Luke, sitting on his legs, staring at the bird, and then at Luke. He bites back a question about death, about having seen countless people die, about many times being the reason they fall to the ground. But he keeps those doubts to himself. Instead he crosses his arms and rests it on the part of the windowsill that Luke isn’t sitting, rests his chin on his arms, and keeps looking.

“I thought maybe I could try and get some small piece of metal to get in the wing, you know? Like try and fake a bone if his are broken. His, because it’s a little dude, I think,” he half-smiles, and he sighs. “But I’m afraid it’ll just hurt him more.”

Michael blinks slowly, at the bird and then at Luke.

“Do you think,” he starts, then pauses, takes a deep breath, raising his eyes to look at Luke. “Do you think I could… I could fix the broken wing? Change the broken bone until it isn’t broken anymore?” he tries. But his voice is a mere murmur, so quiet that Luke may not have heard it.

But he did. He looks at Michael with his lips parted, and shrugs. 

“I could make it worse, though,” he argues, more to himself than Luke, eyes still on the bird, fixed like the bird can hear him, have a say in any of this.

Luke’s thumb keeps caressing the head of the small animal, as it struggles in his palms, and Luke brings it close to his face, whispers to him: “I know, buddy, I know it hurts,” and Michael feels his heart sink, because Luke probably does. But Michael can’t change the awkward angles of his broken bones and how it healed back together without enough care that his skin would scar properly. He could do something about the damn bird.

“Should I try it,” Michael frowns, not quite a question as it’s a statement. He raises his head from the pillow he’s made of his arms.

Luke still doesn’t look at him, eyes still focused on the bird, and he wants to save the little thing so much, if only because Luke would be so happy to see it fly away from this mess of world they live in, the alternate reality of room 93 while the world around them starts blowing up, and they aren’t there yet to see it.

“I think,” Luke starts, finally, “you could do whatever you want with your magick if you learn to control it, and the only way to learn is practicing.” 

Michael gets away from the window, sits on his legs and watches with parted lips as Luke turns back to the inside of the room, bare feet touching the mattress, until he’s bringing the bird inside, too, sitting cross-legged with his shoulders up, as if his body could shield the bird, as if his the way he holds it in his hands could make the bird stop crying and beaking helplessly at Luke.

Stupid bird. Probably thinks it’s Luke who hurt him.

“Your magick is matter change,” Luke snorts, still looking down at the bird. “There’s never been anyone with that type of power before. Tell me you don’t see it, how changing matter could turn into anything else. It could destroy, it could heal,” he raises his eyebrows, still looking down. “You could manipulate anything, from nature to man-made, fix all that’s wrong with the world, or blow it up to pieces.”

Michael blinks slowly at him, his heart picking up on the weight of his words.

“So keeping me in the Order Prison… that wasn’t about Daryl.”

“Probably was, to an extent,” Luke shrugs. “But I think they’re just scared of you. They all are, everywhere, no matter which way you look,” Luke adds with a smirk, and then finally meets his eyes. “Except ahead, I guess. I’m not scared.” 

There’s a little dry laugh out of his mouth, a little dryness in his throat, and a dry wall caging his heart. Michael presses his lips together as he looks at Luke, thinks he maybe sees it, the potential of what he could become, but he doesn’t see what everyone should be scared of. It makes sense, what Luke says, in theory, but in practice it’s plainly impossible. 

Claiming control over his Chaos magick seems as unlikely as them both getting out alive.

“Should the bird be scared?” Michael asks instead of addressing what makes his skin feel uncomfortable, the tingling in his fingertips starting before he even calls magick, the licking at his heels even before he closes his eyes.

Luke takes a deep breath, brings the bird to his eye level. “Are you, buddy?” And then, he looks past the bird, right at Michael. There’s seriousness in his voice when he asks: “Are _you_?”

Michael considers his options.

He could snort and crack a joke, nervously fidgeting at the end of the shirt that probably had Luke’s scent in it but now only smells to the cheap soap Michael used in his shower. He could go and say that he’s never scared, because knows that it’d make Luke smile, because that’s such a dumb lie that could only be a joke. Or he could be honest.

He ends up choosing the latter.

“Yes. All the time.”

Luke’s smirk comes back. He lowers the bird in his hands, and cocks an eyebrow. “Good. It’ll make you strong, give them all a reason to be scared.”

And then, Luke hands him the bird.

He takes a deep breath, and spreads his fingertips, but his breath is suddenly messed up and he laughs quietly because it’s so pathetic, how he’s afraid of even holding the bird, agitated and very close to be out of control, just as he feels. But Luke scoots closer, so much that his knees touch Michael’s right in front of him, both sitting with their legs crossed and their postures straight, like the arrows they are, too, about to bend but never break.

“I can’t hold it,” Michael blurts out.

“Him,” Luke corrects him, quiet and looking down at the bird, and without a warning, he places it in Michael’s hands, but keeps his there, just in case, nesting Michael’s in case he can’t hold the bird in place. It makes Michael’s breath that much more messed up. “Mike, look at me,” Luke says, and Michael has no option but to look up, meet Luke’s calm eyes with his nervous ones. “Breathe. Close your eyes. Make the call if you want to make the call. And then do what you have to do, but don’t stop breathing.”

It’s a little pathetic, how fast the words have an effect on him.

It’s maybe how intent Luke’s eyes are on his, that it feels almost hypnotizing, like he could get drunk on these eyes, and either lose it all or win a whole new world. He presses his lips together, feeling his eyelids a little heavier, and Luke keeps looking him in the eye, so it’s difficult to look away, but he does, anyway. Looks down at the bird in his hands, feeling strange and unwanted, and his hands are cold and sweaty, but Luke’s hands holding his are warm and firm, so he keeps on breathing.

Breathe? Check. Close his eyes? Check. Make the call? Check. Now the other type of call.

His back arches and his shoulder blades jerk back, so much that it hurts like the skin might tear, but it doesn’t. It just opens up his chest, like it might be cut open like Luke’s, and the weight of Luke’s eyes on him, instead of inhibiting his magick, only makes it more vibrant, stronger, and instead of licking at his heels it claws its way up his legs, scratching the skin and the muscles underneath without ever leaving marks. He feels the shiver up his spine and the soft wind in his ear, the whispers coming and going as the Order magick in his veins, familiar, backs down, and something unknown and wild fills his veins like poison.

Only poison is bad. This isn’t bad. Just not entirely his. 

Yet.

He opens his eyes. The fake world of surfaces is gone. All that’s left is the real world.

Luke’s eyes are on him, and everything about him is beautiful and vibrant, and Michael feels his hands against Luke’s, and when he takes a deep breath, his fingers spread more so Luke’s fingers can find place between his. The pounding in his head gets stronger, almost violent, and the hammering in his head, he thinks it’s Luke’s heartbeat.

Swallowing dryly, he feels his hands shaking a bit. They’re warm, like Luke’s.

Shit, he’s connected to Luke.

“Focus,” Luke says, and his voice sounds gentle, quiet and expanding in Michael’s head through the miles and miles that take him away when his eyes are rolled back and the universe’s claimed his eyes. 

He stares at him, unmoving and unblinking and unbreathing.

“And breathe,” Luke reminds him.

So he breathes. 

Michael’s half-forgotten about the bird and half just worried about the salty taste of skin in his tongue that hasn’t touched anything. Luke’s heart still beats in his head and as he raises his fingers, just a tiny little bit, he can feel the texture of Luke’s scars under his fingertips, even if he’s touching the damn bird.

Luke lets go of his hands, and he feels as if he’s been punched.

His breath becomes erratic for a second, the erroneous bond disconnecting and making his head feel dull, his blood stream polluted. But then there’s only the bird with the broken wing in his palms, and he remembers what this was supposed to be about. Testing the limits of his Chaos magick. Trying to get it to mean something other than just destruction. Fixing the damn bird’s broken bone.

Can’t see Luke. Can’t even feel his presence just in front of him, the solidness of his knees touching Michael’s as they sit cross-legged facing each other. All he feels is the thick feathers in his hands, and his fingertips slowly trace the broken wing, he jolts his head backwards, feeling the cry of pain of the bird in his throat, but swallows it back with one deep breath. 

His head pounds but it’s a different type. He feels pain but is detached enough to know it isn’t his. With his eyes wide open and fixed on the bird in his hands, it takes him time to get past the screams echoing in his head and go further. Michael’s sense of time is complex and ample, circular instead of linear, like he could jump back to the past in the next second if he just wanted it bad enough. But it’s some time, he thinks, before he can feel his shaking hands still and spread as he finds himself connecting more specifically to the bird’s bones.

Never before he’s connected himself to something inside someone or something. He tastes blood in his tongue like it’s water, like he could lick it off his teeth. His own bones become parted and angled, and with his shoulders drawn down and his shoulder blades still reaching back, he feels something catch in his throat.

He coughs. Holds the bird in one hand to take a feather out of his mouth.

There’s something making his eyes heavier as he holds the bird in his hands again, shoulders starting to rise again, and he feels something’s off, something’s different, but he’s also this close to just laughing. Because he’s connected to the fucking bird. He can’t fucking believe that he’s doing it. He’s tracing the bird’s bones in his head and hearing the now silent cries as he somehow soothes the pain of the little thing.

Or makes it shut up in his head. He isn’t sure which.

All he knows is his blood vibrates and he doesn’t see a single thing even with his eyes open. He feels the wetness blurring his eyes, can’t understand why he’s tearing up but doesn’t blink either way, afraid the magick will be done with him and go away.

He bends his index finger just a tiny little bit, and the bird lets out a loud creak, but the bones of his wing reconnect, abrupt and painful, but intact either way. 

The feeling of powerfulness that washes over him then, making him part his lips and chuckle lowly, it’s something that he cannot describe. It’s his chest rising and his shoulders trembling just a little bit. His eyes are heavier still and he still sees nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing of the bird and nothing of Luke, but his fingers are moving, and he feels like he could take on the world like this.

Michael starts to say something, parts his lips and there are words about to roll out of his tongue, but he’s still there, in the bird’s bones and in its bloodstream, and when he forces air out, he feels something catching in his throat. 

Letting the bird fall from his hands and onto the bed, he brings both of his hands to his throat. Choking on something, he massages his throat, but his hands are made of cold bones and he can’t stop gagging, coughing, eyes welling up until he feels the stream of shy tears rolling down his cheeks.

His fingers won’t bend, so he forces them to, brutal and abrupt at once, clawing at his own neck, trying to force whatever it is out of his throat and out of himself. He lurches forward, finally screwing up his eyes, forcing the pounding out of his head, the feeling of unbreakable solidness out of his knuckles as he keeps forcing them around his neck. 

When he opens his eyes, they’re back to green, vision too blurry by tears to let him make sense of what he sees at first. He just coughs and coughs, and spits more feathers onto his hands. They’re slick with blood.

His lips quivering, Michael takes a deep shaky breath, and looks ahead to find Luke.

Luke’s got the little body in his hands, apparently just picking it from the bed.

The bird’s dead. All of its biggest bones bent and broken in the most awkward of angles.

And Michael’s to blame.

* * *

After Michael’s first kiss, there’s a fist connecting to his jaw.

Michael’s been in fights before. Never for too long, never too serious, but he has.

Before he moved to the city, he was the biggest boy in his school. Now, he admits that he was a bit of a coward, picking fights with kids his age but smaller, raising his eyebrows because his eyes wouldn’t roll back yet. But it’s alright, he thinks, would never tell anyone his story to make him seem like a martyr or a hero, so he doesn’t need to be brave. All he did was to shove them away anyway, close his fists but never throw the first punch.

In the city, the fight opportunities were endless, but there were no reasons to fight.

In his school, with kids bigger than him and meaner smiles, it was easier to shrink and let himself go by unnoticed, until there were friends to stick to, and then nobody wanted to pick a fight with him, anyway. 

But after his first kiss, there’s a fist connecting to his jaw.

He’d say he’d deserved it, if it didn’t hurt so much, and he didn’t feel like he was stepping on lava, not sure where to go, feet moving as he loses balance but not enough to fall. Then he swears, because his tongue’s his best weapon, and if he can’t punch back, if he can’t even open his eyes with how tight they’re shut, he can still yell: “You motherfucker!”

He opens his eyes, welled up with tears, and they aren’t only because the punch hurts.

Calum’s standing in front of him, with his nostrils flared and his chest going up and down fast, and he’s got some tears of his own, just doesn’t look like he’s going to let them fall anytime soon. He’s flustered, angry, hands numb to his sides, fists set as if he could throw another punch if Michael does as much as flinch his way. His shoulders are tensed up, and he looks so, so lost. His eyes are red, but he won’t, he just won’t cry, Michael knows.

Michael massages his jaw, blinking a couple of time, Calum in front of him properly coming into focus, and then he’s finding his ground again, taking a deep, deep breath, and preparing himself for the next couple of insults he’s got on his tongue.

“How could you do this, Michael?” Calum asks, and sniffs, hard and hurt. At first, Michael thinks he’s talking about Michael kissing him, but then he adds: “I love her. Why would you do this to me…” he closes his eyes, and shakes his head.

Michael snorts, tilting his chin up.

“You _love_ her? You’ve been dating for like a month.” 

His bottom lip quivers, and for a split second Michael thinks maybe he’s been wrong about Calum, and he doesn’t know the boy as well as he’d thought. But no, it’s gone as fast as it appears, and he’s definitely not shedding any tears in front of Michael today. Instead there’s only the contempt in his face as he wrinkles his nose.

“It’s not about how long it’s been. You don’t know love at all,” he raises his eyebrows, an accusing finger pointing directly at Michael. “And don’t you dare try and fucking tell me you have a thing for Maddy, or you have a thing for me, because it ain’t true. You just can’t stand to see anyone happy, and you keep ruining everything!”

He supposes that much is true.

Michael isn’t sure what he thought was going to happen. 

Hit on Maddy, the only girl who’s ever dedicated herself to a friendship with him, who tried to see him for who he was, past Karen in the Council, past the big house and the bad grades. Hit on her, and it was so fucking useless, because she just stared at him, like she couldn’t believe he’d do that to Calum, to her. She didn’t crack, didn’t cheat on Calum, didn’t give Michael any reason to believe he was right when he thought she was just wrong for Calum, and Calum wrong for her. 

The only logical next step was this, kissing his best friend in his bedroom, when they were supposed to talk, when Maddy absolutely must’ve told Calum already about her strange moment with Michael and how he put some of her hair behind her ear and smiled at her.

If anything, he thought things would go back to normal, to what they were before. The three of them, sure, but not Calum and Maddy, and then Michael. 

He’s always needed to cause a little chaos. 

But sure. Massaging his jaw and staring with an offended frown at his best tear-eyed best friend, he knows he’s gone too far. These are real people he’s playing with, and his jealousy isn’t the center of the world. He only half understands this, though. 

Admitting to his mistake isn’t an option. Not now. Too proud, too stubborn.

Snorting again, he raises his eyebrows and his shoulders. “Don’t think you’re being a little overdramatic there, buddy?” he forces a laugh. Calum’s frown just grows deeper, as if Michael’s finally punched him back. “I only kissed you. Get over yourself.”

Calum presses his lips together, and then yells. At Michael, but also at thin air, a yell of hurt and frustration, and then it looks like he’s punching air with both of his fists, just so he won’t do it to Michael. And Michael sort of wishes he would, because then he’d have to stop looking at him, close his eyes in pain, instead of just feeling the ache on his jaw as he takes another deep breath, tries chuckling at the scene, but his tongue tastes bitter in his mouth.

“Fucking hell, Michael,” Calum says, and sure, Michael gets that, too. 

Fucking hell is about right.

“You’re supposed to be my best friend, you know that?” Calum asks, raising his voice again. “Not hit on my girlfriend and then kiss me. What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?” And the last question isn’t screaming, isn’t offensive, is just a murmur thrown his way. 

Michael presses his lips together for a second. “Wanted my first kiss to be special,” he says, kissing his palm, and with a petulant smile, he directs his hand Calum’s way.

Calum slaps his hand away, looking disgusted. 

“This isn’t you.”

It’s a decisive statement. Michael suddenly feels as if he’s in court and Calum is testifying, saying that no, absolutely not, this isn’t the person he’s spent the last few years of his life sharing memories and secrets with. This isn’t the boy he bought skateboards with and laughed with until he cried so many times that a smile would come to his lips as a knee-jerk reaction to seeing him. Calum firmly believes that this ghost is clawing at Michael’s insides and taking away all the good parts, but he doesn’t know shit. He doesn’t know that it’s just the Chaos in him. 

Calum would never understand what it’s like to have half of your genetic to blame for all your bad decisions and daddy issues. He doesn’t get to get away with that.

Michael does. And he’ll take his chance to not deal with the things that really need to be dealt with, every single time. It’s just better this way. More Orderly.

He snorts at his own thought, shakes his head, and starts towards the door of Calum’s bedroom. Calum takes a deep loud breath, the type that would make him turn, but his jaw still hurts and he can still feel his best friend’s lips against his, so he keeps going.

“You know what, Michael,” Calum says, as an after-thought. “You don’t get to say anything about what Maddy and I have, because you don’t know the first thing about love. You don’t, because you hate yourself too much to even recognize love when you see it.”

Michael pauses, for just a second.

And then he’s out the door.

* * *

“It’s okay,” Luke says, slowly and tentative.

Michael doesn’t really listen to him at first. He’s got his jaw set and can still taste blood in his mouth. He’s brushed his teeth three times since he did it, since he killed the damn bird, spat those feathers on his hands, along with the blood that came from his throat as it scratched its way up. Still it tastes to blood. He looks at his hands, long washed, and he still sees blood, too. 

Luke’s already taken the little body outside, buried it in the woods out of their window, like he wouldn’t for any of the people he’s killed with his blow-torch or his guns. But Michael can’t stop seeing the fucking dead bird in his head. 

He killed it.

He killed _him_.

“Mikey,” Luke tries again, tugging at his shirt. Michael takes a deep breath, looking at him, but not really being able to focus much on the image in front of him. The image in front of him frowns quietly and sits in front of him on Michael’s bed, moves his mouth and the words come out, but they don’t sink in: “You didn’t mean to. It’s fine.”

Michael looks at him. 

He misses panic. 

The thing is, when he’s panicking, he can detach himself from his body. He watches as his soul loses all control and his body moves around, but the two are not connected. It’s awful, is what it is, but it’s still better than this calm misery, and maybe Calum was right, all that time ago, about him. Maybe there’s something terrible inside him, clawing at his insides, only he can’t blame Chaos for that this time, because he felt it: the rush of power.

But even then, he did believe he had cured the stupid bird.

Remorseful, he stares past Luke, eyes glassy and quiet. 

“Shit,” Luke murmurs, and then Luke isn’t gentle and kind anymore.

It takes Michael by surprise, as he watches with a frown, as Luke frowns back at him. First he takes the blanket away, the one that’s kept Michael wrapped tightly for the past hour. Takes it away against Michael’s protests, first of his hands, then loud and whining. Luke keeps the blanket away, shoves it to the other side of the room, and it falls to the floor, inanimate and Michael’s. It’s his. He doesn’t get why Luke’s being like this.

And then it comes, his voice thicker than before, saying: “Are you going to fucking sulk forever because your magick didn’t work this one single time? Fuck off, Michael. You can be the most dangerous witch in the world.”

“I don’t want to,” Michael says, setting his jaw, looking at Luke, and just as Luke’s eyes harden, Michael’s soften. “I don’t want to be a killer.”

Luke shifts on the bed to sit on his legs, stops on eye level with Michael, cups his face with both hands, and still sounds harsher and older when he speaks next. “So don’t. You get to decide who you are. Fucking own it.”

Michael’s set jaw aches, and he presses his lips together. 

His eyes well up, and Luke’s finally soften too, and then, when he takes a deep breath, Luke murmurs, “Come here,” and pulls him closer. 

It isn’t that he collapses against Luke as much as he melts into him. He wraps his arms around his waist and breathes heavily against his shoulder as Luke touches the back of his head, his back, keeps him warm and soothed, and when the first sob escapes him, he isn’t ashamed. Even when he screws up his eyes, and Luke’s shirt gets damp where Michael’s face is rested against, even then, he still isn’t embarrassed.

It’s fast, and it’s cleansing. Kind of like his first shower in room 93.

When he puts some distance between them, Luke’s got one hand in the back of his neck, the other on the side of his face, thumb taking away the last of the tears, and Luke’s little frown from so close makes his heart sink a little deeper.

For a second there, he thinks maybe Luke will kiss him.

He’d let him.

Instead, Luke tilts his head up and presses his lips to Michael’s forehead.

He’ll take that, too.

* * *

It takes maybe a week for Calum and Michael to make up.

Maddy doesn’t forgive him. Calum does. 

He never asks for forgiveness, anyway.

It’s just that Calum’s heart is too big or his head gets too lonely, and he needs Michael around so he doesn’t feel like he’s the only one in the world who sees that the world isn’t right, and everyone is struggling to just keep smiling and pretending. Michael goes with it when Calum shows up on his porch with a bag of chips and a new football video game. If Calum’s ready to forgive and forget, focus on forget, then Michael supposes he can play along. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t need it, three times as badly.

Calum is Michael’s only friend, and now his girlfriend knows that Michael’s full of shit.

Maddy flips him off the next time she sees him, and proceeds to ignore him every single time after that, but it only means that Calum has to divide his time between the two of them, and this is Calum’s problem, not his.

Sometimes he can’t sleep at night, thinking of what he’s done.

* * *

His head doesn’t pound anymore and his heart’s stop racing as if to win against his conscience. He’s lying on Luke’s bed but he gets to keep the blanket as long as he pretends like he isn’t thinking about the blood in his throat and the feathers on his hands anymore.

Luke’s lying in the opposite direction, to his right Luke’s feet, until Luke decides to bend his knees and rest his feet on the windowsill, and it must be around the middle of the afternoon, but Michael can’t wait for until it’s so dark that the stars are the only thing illuminating the room. Then he’ll work out the nerve to ask Luke about the neon colors of his lip ring. 

“If you could have any magick, what would it be?” 

Michael smiles. “Fire manipulation. Shit, I just think it’s so impressive. So beautiful.”

Luke snorts, tilting his head up and crossing his arms behind his head, looking at Michael. “That’s why you kept blowing stuff up before.” Michael parts his lips to argue against it, but Luke insists. “Think about it. You can change matter -- that pretty much shapes into whatever magick you want it to be. You wanted fire. You got fire,” he shrugs.

“Ah, I don’t know. But whatever,” he says, because there isn’t much else he can say, and his cheeks are heating up. “How about you? If you could ditch metal manipulation for anything at all, what would that be?”

“Um,” Luke considers it, relaxing back, staring at the ceiling with a frown and a funny face that makes Michael bite back a smile, watching him quietly. “I think I’d be invisible.”

Michael drops his head back with an exaggerated frustrated grunt, and pokes Luke in the chest with his foot. Luke laughs, shoves his foot away, asks loudly what was that for. “That’s boring, Luke! Nobody wants to disappear.”

And then it hits him.

Oh.

But Luke pulls himself to sit cross-legged and looks past Michael’s parted lips and pre-apology on the tip of his tongue. He just laughs easily, shrugging. “I mean, wouldn’t it be cool? Plus, like, I’d follow people around without them knowing it, and hear all they have to say about me behind my back,” he winks, like that’s some serious creative idea.

Michael pulls himself to sit, too, snorting. “Ah, c’mon. Who cares what anyone thinks?”

Luke raises his eyebrows. Michael shrugs.

“Do you want your piercing again?” Luke asks, so all of sudden that it makes Michael blink a couple of times, startled, not really sure what he’s talking about, until he raises his hand to his face, touches his eyebrow. “Yeah, there. Do you?”

First he says: “Because there’s a big variety in this room,” and second, when he realizes the mistake in what he said: “I mean, it isn’t like we have the sterilized stuff anyway.”

Luke shrugs. “I can shape any piece of metal into the exact size and color you want, and make it purer and cleaner than any sterilizing machine.” He pauses, looks at him, really does, like he’s seeing past Michael chewing on his bottom lip nervously, way past the way he fidgets at the blanket up to then forgotten behind him. “I’ve done this before, too.”

Michael half-smiles. “You have?”

“Once,” Luke frowns, suddenly, “but still.”

Chuckling, Michael looks away, down at his hands, and with a bit of a frown, he still has one more question: “Still. What are you going to tell Halsey and Geordie when they see me, suddenly with a piercing on the face? They’ll… they’ll know.”

“Oh, _that’s_ worrying you?” Luke laughs quietly, scooting closer. “I’ll just tell them I put a tracker in it, so I could find you if you ran, or something,” he rolls his eyes, gesturing dismissively.

Michael narrows his eyes, looking at him. “You could do that?”

Parting his lips, he pauses. “Michael, I won’t.”

“That’s a good idea,” he cuts him off, before the defensiveness and the frown. Luke only raises his eyebrows, like he doesn’t follow, so Michael licks his lips and starts again. “Look, just in case something happens. Okay? You could find me.”

Getting quieter, his voice lowers and lowers until it’s just barely above a whisper. “You’d trust me to find you?” he asks, and then sucks on his own piercing, that look on his face, like he’s holding his breath.

Michael tilts his head to the side with a half-smile. “You have before.” And because that makes Luke look at him in a way that he can’t read, Michael drops back against the bed with a small nervous giggle, saying, maybe a bit too loudly: “Okay. Fucking do it already!”

“Alright!” Luke says, maybe a bit too loudly, sounding just as excited and a tiny bit nervous as Michael feels. “Any demands?”

“Black bar. Hopefully not heavy tracker inside. Don’t make it hurt.”

Luke drops by his side heavily, but on his belly, not on his back. He’s got his eyes blinked in all black but Michael’s not taken aback by that anymore. He just smiles back as he watches Luke make his own lip ring expand and burn in his hand.

“I can’t make it not hurt, Mikey,” Luke tells him fondly with a chuckle.

Michael turns just his head to look at him. It’s still fucked up, what he did today, but having Luke so close, their arms touching as Luke manipulates the ring until it’s back to what it was, and there’s a bar eyebrow piercing on his palm, it’s soothing. It’s more than just to his mood, though; it calms the demons in his heart. It makes him smile his actual smile, instead of the cynical one he’d perfected over the years.

“And the tracker?” Michael asks quietly, when Luke blinks his eyes back.

“It’s already here, vibrating through the metal. Jack did it, right after I got my lip pierced. Spent a few days with the piercing in his laboratory and then I had to get it pierced again, because it closed off,” he rolls his blue eyes, snorting. “But he made it so he wouldn’t lose me, and now I won’t lose you, either,” he half-smiles, quiet and soft, looking at the new piercing in his hand.

Michael doesn’t say anything, and then Luke gives him a worried look.

“Should I not have said that?”

And then Michael’s smiling again, a timid chuckle and the shadow of smile that stays. “You should say whatever you want to say,” Michael says, and his heart keeps sinking, stubborn and ugly, and all he can think of, is that if Luke had been born Order, he’d be the most brilliant boy, untouched by tragedy, hands clean of any intrigue or blood. 

But it wouldn’t be him.

“I’m ready when you are,” Michael tells him, a little playful, and it makes Luke smirk.

With Michael lying back and Luke propping up on his elbows, he blinks his eyes in black again, so he can manipulate the metal. As he positions one of his arms over Michael’s chest, hand close to his face, he says: “I’m going to needle it first, okay? Once it’s in I can make it go back to the original width, and there you go, you’ll have your piercing back, and nobody to tell you to take it off.”

It’s sort of weird, in an unusual but not bad way, the soothing tone of voice that comes with the petrol black eyes. That, added with Luke’s hovering hand close to his face but waiting for some confirmation before pressing the no doubt now needle-shaped bar, just makes Michael bite back a smile of nervousness, and though Luke’s still sort of on his side, he touches the sides of his waist, tentative and unsure.

“If it hurts too much, I’m kicking your ass,” he says quietly, the smile still there.

Through the expressionless blackness of his eyes, Luke still manages to make his half-smile look mischievous enough that Michael’s hands feel firmer against the fabric of Luke’s T-shirt. There’s this bit of electricity there, when Luke blinks his eyes back to blue, close to him, and Michael squeezes his waist, with lips parted and taking a deep breath. The way Luke looks at him, then, that is definitely electricity, making a shiver run up his spine.

But just as smoothly, he blinks back to black, and the side of his hand touches Michael’s face, as he sticks the needle to Michael’s skin. Michael shuts his eyes, surprised, teeth sinking on his bottom lip as he buries his fingertips and too long uncut nails on Luke’s waist.

“Fuck,” he manages to breathe out, once he hears Luke chuckling lowly.

“Almost there. I just need to expand it back now. Ready?”

“Is it going to hurt?” he asks, eyes still closed, body tense, hands unmoving.

“Yeah, a bit more than before.”

Though Michael usually appreciates the honesty, now is a time when he’d gladly take Luke’s lies. Somehow it just makes him frown harder and press his lips together, bracing himself for the worst. There’s a pause, and then it comes, the burning against his skin, and it doesn’t hurt as much, but it’s just abrupt, Luke making it fast to try and make it less painful, that Michael’s fingers bury against the skin of Luke’s waist, forcing him down.

One of his legs falls on top of Michael’s, and when Michael opens his eyes to look at Luke, he’s a bit breathless and catching his bottom lip between his teeth. 

Luke looks at him with baby blue eyes, resting his weight on his elbow on one side of Michael’s head, the other hand moving away from Michael’s face. And with his leg awkwardly on top of Michael’s, the boy who owns a blow-torch blushes.

Michael’s heart speeds up, and his fingers spread on the small of Luke’s back, and somehow that’s enough for Luke to stop holding back like he’s afraid he might crush Michael with only half his weight. His leg slots between Michael’s, and he clears his throat, his hand touching Michael’s chest tentatively.

“So, um, it hurt, then?”

“Yeah. Gonna have to kick your ass now,” Michael says slowly, carefully, trying to resist the urge to just smile his widest smile. 

Luke chuckles lowly, looks away from his eyes and to the piercing. From this close, he looks a little cross-eyed looking at something specific, but it’s sort of… adorable. Maybe. “It looks nice, though, the piercing,” he says, his palm against Michael’s chest, rubbing quietly, softly, gently. “Like a missing piece,” he decides, looking him in the eye again.

It’s so overwhelming, the warmth and solidness of his body against the side of Michael’s, the uncertainty of his hand on Michael’s chest, looking at him with those baby blue eyes, as Michael holds his breath and bites the insides of his cheeks, and his hands go a little up, timid but traveling up Luke’s back anyway, making him come closer still.

He isn’t really breathing.

“Yeah?” Michael asks, raising his eyebrows, feeling the weight of the metal on one of his.

“Yeah,” Luke replies quietly, and smirks.

They’re so close that when Luke chuckles lowly, Michael feels it, like it could vibrate through his veins, just that chuckle alone. He licks his lips, and Luke’s eyes glance down at his mouth, and Michael’s heart sinks. For good measure, or encouragement, or something, his hands pull Luke closer still, and he reluctantly lets himself go, eyes darting back to Michael’s eyes, searching him for a sign to stop.

When he finds none, he takes a deep breath, and with that little smile on his lips, he closes his eyes before Michael. Michael smiles as he closes his eyes too, and Luke’s hand touches the back of Michael’s neck just before his lips cover Michael’s, pressing a smile against his.

It’s Michael who moves his lips first, as his hands move up, too, wrapping around Luke, tongue licking at the seam of Luke’s bottom lip, finding the strange metal, catching it between his teeth. Luke sighs softly against him, hand sliding back to his chest, his shoulder, parting his lips and deepening the kiss. Michael’s heart is hammering against his chest, when his tongue slides against Luke’s, warm and wet, and he sort of never wants to let go, not with the softness, the quietness of this.

But then Luke pulls away abruptly, looking at him with wide eyes and a big smile. 

Michael raises his eyebrows, feels his mouth mirror Luke’s smile even if he’s confused.

Luke lets go of him, turning and dropping heavily on the bed just next to him. “I can’t believe I kissed you!” he says, overly excited and loud. Michael chuckles, props up on his elbow to look at him, and he’s got the hugest grin on his face, staring up. “We _kissed_ ,” he adds, as an after-thought.

“I was there,” Michael says, biting back a smile, and his head feels light, the taste of Luke’s tongue still against his. He scoots closer, until his body is touching Luke’s again, and touches his arm, tentatively. “And, I mean, we can kiss again. If you want.”

Looking at him suddenly, Michael thinks it’s the first time it registers that they’re the same age. The eagerness mixed with nervousness of seventeen hits Michael’s hard as he holds back a smile as he watches Luke not hold back at all. 

“I definitely want to kiss you again,” Luke says, and he sucks on his bottom lip for a second, before he takes a deep breath, and announces: “I want to kiss you all the time.”

Michael smiles a bit shyly, and then throws a leg over him, straddling Luke as he lowers to meet him, and he’s only halfway when Luke’s arms wrap around his waist, bring him closer, peck at his lips once, twice, three times, before he’s deepening the kiss and giggling against Michael’s mouth. Michael licks that giggle out of his mouth, and everything he finds in the process, too. He’s glad he’s on top of Luke this time, because then he won’t notice if Michael’s heart suddenly fails him, because his legs will. God, he’s glad he isn’t standing.

One of Luke’s hands is on the back of his neck, and then his head, getting lost in the galaxy hair, and the other on Michael’s back, gentle and barely there, just keeping him close. Michael can’t help it that he kisses Luke harder, that his hands travel down his torso and stop at his waist. Michael hold his breath, pulls away from Luke just a tiny bit, kisses his jaw and then his neck. To every single thing he wants to tell Luke but can’t possibly bring himself to, he presses another kiss down his neck.

His thoughts start spiralling out of control, though, and he’s almost positive he’ll have to admit some of these things at least to himself, so he sneaks his fingers under Luke’s T-shirt and presses a kiss to the much he can reach of Luke’s collarbone instead.

If his lips keep pressed and his tongue keeps busy with skin, then he’ll keep his mouth shut.

Both of Luke’s hands go to his face, cupping it and bringing him closer, and Michael goes, kisses his mouth, frowns and keeps pressing secrets into Luke’s mouth, because his vocal cords aren’t as trustworthy as his tongue, and his voice doesn’t work as well as his hands, bringing Luke’s T-shirt up, up, up.

He pulls away when his hands are so up that the only way is Luke lifting his arms so Michael can help him out of it, and when he looks at him, Luke with his eyes blown darker but not because of magick, still a ring of blue around the black, his lips red and swollen, his neck wet with Michael’s kisses, he feels his stomach do little flips.

He lowers his head again, just to brush his lips against Luke’s once more.

Luke lifts his hands and takes off his shirt with Michael’s help, and truth is, Michael tried not to touch him much, knows his nails need cutting and his hands are probably a bit cold with nervousness. But his lips are parted, staring down at him, and Luke’s blushing, just a bit, and it makes him smile. God, it does. It makes him smile so much.

He presses his closed lips to just under his collarbone, where the first scar starts.

Luke lets out a little strangled noise, that Michael can’t read, so he touches the side of his body carefully, with his head down, raising his eyes to him. “Is this okay?”

Touching the back of his head with a half-smile and flustered cheeks, Luke chuckles quietly. “Yeah, yeah, it’s just… the scars are ugly. You don’t have to.”

Michael snorts, shakes his head, closes his eyes as he presses another kiss on his chest. “They’re not,” he says, quietly, lips brushing against Luke’s skin. “They’re beautiful,” he tells Luke, and he thinks Luke’s hand on his hair is shaky, so he turns to the side, and kisses his hand, too. This one secret, he lets himself admit out loud: “You’re beautiful.”

* * *

Halsey underestimated him. 

What did she think? That she’d somehow appeal to the martyr in him, putting others first just so his life will be more tragic and lonely? Fuck her. She’s got the wrong hero. He’s put his own needs before when it meant fucking with his best friend’s head, even though it was the person he loved the most in the world. Just because he was feeling envious. He didn’t mean to do it, but he still did it. 

She’s underestimated his heart, how it gets sometimes. She’s accused him of being selfish, and he knows it to be true. So what? There are worse things to be. With the nights to come, when he’ll stay up and reevaluate all his wrong turns, he’ll tell himself: at least he isn’t Daryl. At least he’s keeping alive without leaving a body count behind him. 

Michael isn’t making Luke leave.

* * *

Michael isn’t good at sharing, but he doesn’t mind sharing his blanket when it’s with Luke, both of them tangled together under the thing, Luke’s hands wrapped around his middle, his face between Michael’s shoulder blades. And it feels good, waking up to that, turning to look over his shoulder and seeing that Luke’s in a peaceful sleep, free of nightmares and the past. It makes him sigh and bite his lip, and while he does feel guilty of not telling Luke about Halsey, about how he needs to go, he’s also made up his mind about what’s happening next. As soon as Luke wakes up, he’s suggesting they run away together.

With Luke’s resourcefulness, and Jack probably willing to help him in whatever he chooses to do, this couldn’t be so hard. He just… he can’t think of anyone who needs to get away from all of this more than Luke. And he wants to be with him, if he finds peace.

He’s thinking maybe the village he and Karen used to live with, a couple of hours away from the city, if nobody remembers him. They can maybe finish school, because no matter how Luke seemed to shrug it off, Michael thinks he wishes he could’ve stayed. And it’ll be alright. They can make new friends who won’t betray them, and nobody has to know about Luke’s Chaos or Michael’s bad genes. Nobody has to know about Daryl, and with the passing time, he’ll find a way to let Karen know he’s alright.

He is. In Luke’s arms and under the warmth of this blanket, he really is.

Even if the piercing on his eyebrow still stings a bit.

He lowers his head to look at Luke’s hands around him, touches his hands over Michael’s stomach, intertwines their fingers quietly and with a silly smile on his face. And it feels so, so good, and so, so comfortable.

But the Order magick inside him is impatient, making his instincts a little wild, and for the past few minutes he’d been ignoring it, kicking the thought aside, assuming it’s probably the Order in him rejecting the Chaos lying with his chest against Michael’s back. But then he looks up and out the window, and sees that isn’t it.

Letting go of Luke, he leaves in bed, so he can get closer to the window, and look.

The day is clear and the breeze makes him feel cold, just on his underwear and with the skin still warm from before, but he barely even registers the goosebumps on his skin. Instead he narrows his eyes to look at the small planes up in the sky. They are three, black, and like nothing Michael’s ever seen. He keeps staring, feeling his stomach sink.

They start getting closer, still too far in the distance for Michael’s hands to start shaking. Then he reads, on the underside of the first one, in enormous letters: ORDER VULTURE. 

His lips part, and his heart quickens.

“Shit.”


	9. the end's not near. it's here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can i just say i'm very proud of this chapter? (▰˘◡˘▰) it was the most difficult to write, but i think it paid off. i really like how it turned out. re: the comments: i'm going to reply to them right after i update the chapter, was just too excited to post the chapter already and couldn't wait until i'd replied to all the comments. but thank you so, so much for leaving those. i can't tell you how much i appreciate them, and your support. it means the world to me. ♥♥♥ and with that being said, have fun!!!! hope you like the chapter a lot! (“⌒∇⌒”)

“They’re here,” Michael whispers, more to himself than anything else, and then, stumbling on his way to lie back, touching Luke’s shoulders alarmingly, turning him so he’s on his back and blinking slowly, squinting his eyes at the clarity: “Luke, Luke, Luke. They’re here. They found us.”

Luke frowns as if he doesn’t know what Michael’s talking about. He parts his lips and Michael widens his eyes, bottom lip quivering and hands shaking. He whispers Luke’s name again, more desperate this time, and something in that must wash away all the sleepiness in Luke’s face. He blinks it away, tilts his head to the side, and Michael lets him go. Luke sits on the bed, taking a deep breath, and wordlessly, looks out the window. 

They can still see the planes, now the white letters against the black metal clearer: ORDER VULTURES. Michael shakes his head, stands up, starts pacing the room, looking for his T-shirt. “Where the fuck did I put that,” and then, his voice shakier, “I can’t believe they’re here, I can’t… God, we’re fucked. I can’t believe we’ve come all this way just to die.”

He turns to Luke, his silence absolutely terrifying. 

Luke’s sighing heavily again, finally looking away from the window. He rubs his eyes, mutters: “Fuck,” and this is it. It’s not the reaction Michael needs.

“The planes look made of metal. Can’t you manipulate it, make it explode, or something?”

“Nope,” Luke says, shrugging a bit. “I’m definitely not that powerful.”

There’s a pause, milliseconds expanding slowly.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Michael asks, stopping in front of him, staring into his blue eyes, feeling his stomach sink, his hands shake. He’s a mess and can’t bring himself to breathe properly, and Luke just shoots him a look of confusion.

“I’m not doing anything,” he says, quietly, staring back.

Not that he knows what he needs right now, but Chaotic Luke acting all Orderly calm all of sudden isn’t it. It’s far from it. 

“My point exactly,” he snorts, spreads his arms, voice loud and out of control. Suddenly, he feels like crying. Not crying because he’s sad or even because he’s scared. Just uncontrollable sobs and clawing at walls. Something. Anything. “We have to run,” he says, because no one’s coming up with anything helpful. “Maybe out the window, through those woods? Think they’re thick enough?” Michael asks, talking too fast, speech slurred, knees already on the bed, moving closer to the window, hungry for a way out, heart hammering against his chest.

Luke wraps his arms around his waist, presses a kiss to his spine. “Mikey, we can’t run.” Turning back to him with raised eyebrows and a stunned expression, he stares. Luke’s shoulders fall down, and he gives Michael an almost apologetic look. “We can’t outrun the Vultures. We’re going to have to fight.”

Michael snorts, because it’s ridiculous.

They have to run, or else they’ll die.

He feels a sob building in his throat, his hands shaking so bad he feels his shoulders uneasy, his own body out of his reach. He could be slipping away, in ways he only thought possible when he was at the Order Prison. And he’d missed panic. How fucking stupid.

“I can’t _fight_ ,” Michael tells him, eyes welling up as he struggles in his arms to turn and look at him. His voice cracks, but he isn’t embarrassed. He’s just terrified, which is so much different.

“You don’t have to, then,” Luke gives him a half-smile, something between timid and endeared, and Michael doesn’t think he understands. 

Maybe he isn’t fully awake yet, because he can’t have grasped the seriousness of the situation. Michael feels another sob build in his throat, and this one he can’t swallow down, can’t make his erratic breath calm down, and Luke seems to take notice. He presses his forehead to Michael’s, eyelids heavy, one arm just under his arm and his hand grabbing at his back, his other hand cupping Michael’s jaw. It doesn’t help him. Michael can’t breathe.

He parts his lips to tell Luke just that, that the solidness of his face close to Michael’s isn’t doing anything for his obstructed throat and his dormant lungs, but then Luke raises his eyes to him, connects their eyes in a way that makes a shiver go up Michael’s spine. He says: “Breathe, Mikey.”

And like breath is being punched out of him, he breathes in messy chunks of air that feel thick in his throat, but his shoulders stop feeling too heavy, and he nods quietly, his hands touching tentatively the sides of Luke’s body. 

“I like it when you call me Mikey,” he confesses, almost a mute man whisper, making it shameful and dirty if this is to be his last confession.

Luke smiles, presses his lips to Michael’s very briefly. “Thought you didn’t.”

“Changed my mind,” he whispers back, breathing through his mouth, still trying to steady his nervous heart. He closes his eyes, because he feels Luke’s lips touching his again, and he can still hear his heart echoing in room 93, no longer safe and no longer a bubble, and his next words come as a plea, brushed against Luke’s closed lips: “Please, let’s run.”

And then comes the slamming against the wall.

His heart jumps back to his throat, and Luke stands up straight and away from him. Michael doesn’t know why his first instinct is to reach for Luke’s T-shirt thrown by the end of the bed, why he feels like not being on just his underwear when he’s killed is such a big deal. Maybe so when Karen finds his body, she doesn’t know. He puts on a pair of pants, too, long-forgotten on the floor by Luke’s big bag.

Luke’s quiet at first, blinks his eyes black and stands very still, and then the slamming comes again, harder this time, a desperate: “Open this fucking door or I’ll fucking…!” It’s Halsey. Terrified terrifying Halsey.

With his eyes still rolled back, without his shirt or shoes and wearing a gray pair of sweatpants, Luke moves his hand swiftly, and something in the door clicks. She’s inside so, so fast, that Michael barely registers the next split seconds. She launches at Luke’s arms. Closes her eyes and hugs him tight, and he’s got one arm wrapped around her when he raises his hand again, and Michael watches the metal of the door merge with the wood of the wall next to it.

Michael’s quiet and small, hands still shaking and giving her a dirty look, like she doesn’t get to hug Luke, care for him, not after what she said to Michael. Not after threatening to put a bullet in his head because of Michael, because Michael wouldn’t make him leave.

She opens her eyes, and they fall on Michael.

And suddenly, she’s irate.

Once the door’s sealed and he moves to hug her properly, she puts distance between them, punching him on the chest. He winces at the pain, takes a step back, and she does it again, on his arm this time, eyes filled with tears and teeth gritted. “You! Fucking! Idiot!” she says, each pause for a new punch. “You slept with him?! Luke, he’s a fucking-- he’s using you, you dumb, stupid, rid--!” she stops herself, out of breath and patience.

She stops in front of him, stares at Luke in a way that spells disappointment.

Luke’s eyes are to Michael, and he can’t see him, but he feels as if he should say something. She is, after all, talking about him. But all he can think of is that this is not the time. If they do somehow manage to get out of this alive, then Halsey can accuse him a thousand times more, and Michael will tell Luke about what she’d said, how she tried to guilt-trip him into making Luke leave. Or something. He doesn’t know.

But this is not the time. Right now, he’s just begging to anyone watching in heaven or hell that they don’t die tonight. He’d make a deal with any demon if they cared to show up, but in all honesty, they’re probably all chattering excitedly, talking about how overdue this is.

People like them, they were born with an expired date.

Luke sighs heavily, and says: “Where’s Geordie?”

“Are you going to fucking ignore me, you--?!”

And Michael had never seen Luke act on his size, the broadness of his shoulders, how much taller and stronger he is than Halsey and Geordie combined, but right now, he does. Holding her by the shoulders so she stops shifting away in nervous angry steps, he asks again, louder and clearer: “Halsey, where the fuck is Geordie?”

She stares at him. Seems to swallow back a couple of insults, a couple of hurt confessions.

“Gone,” she says, slowly. “Went to the gas station fifteen minutes ago to call Dylan, try and get some news on Ashton, but… she went with the jeep. She must’ve seen the Vultures, and,” she shuts her eyes, turns her face away from Luke, and his hold on her shoulders becomes softer, different, he squeezes them soothingly instead, sliding down her arms, sighing when she sighs, hurting when she hurts. “Probably saw we’d been caught, made up a lie and fled.”

“I’m sorry,” Luke says, small.

The first thing Michael says since Halsey stormed into the room is a timid, “Maybe she didn’t leave.” Because that’s what he’d like to be true. Not because he cares about Geordie, not because he even cares that Halsey looks fucking devastated to be left behind. Just because he needs Halsey to understand that leaving isn’t good.

Fuck, he decided to not leave Luke so fast. How the hell could he have tried to convince him that he should’ve made Luke leave instead? And he realizes, it’s a selfish call, to say what he does, but he does it thinking, honestly and truly thinking, that he’s saying something smart, something good, making it better when his heart won’t stop climbing up his throat, and he can feel it clawing up his insides.

Luke turns to look at him, but he can’t read his expression.

Now, Halsey’s, hers isn’t difficult to read.

She squints her eyes, and then she’s walking his way, in catty slow steps, words spat in such disgust that Michael feels each of them burn against his skin. “Why do you think we’re here, Michael? Why do you think we’re all dying today?” she raises her throat. Luke calls her name, frowns and stares, but she ignores him, tilting her head to the side. “Oh, I don’t know, is it maybe because of you?! We could’ve been miles away, all safe for different reasons. But you had to go and start fucking Luke, had to go and make him lie to us!”

“Halsey, stop!” Luke asks, his voice thicker and darker, and Michael sees it, he thinks, Luke like a ticking bomb, lips pressed together and tight-fisted, but he isn’t the only one who’s got claws.

Michael snorts, loud and offended, out of patience and things to lose. He gets on his knees on the bed, just so he could be on her eye-level, because what he says next feels like it should be said looking her in the eye.

“Are you fucking _serious_?! You were this ready to end him, you psychopath! He was lying because he knew you were going to fucking kill him, and he didn’t want to leave you,” he stares, frowning at her, and he may be exposing Luke with that, but he doesn’t give a damn. Right now, all he cares about is wiping that angry self-righteous smile off her face.

And it works. Sort of, anyway.

She freezes, gives him a long look, and Luke takes a deep breath, snorts, too, and then before they can come to a conclusion on whose fault it is that they’re all dying, they’re confronted with the eminent truth once again. The ground beneath them shakes, the deafening sound of planes landing too close on terrain not made for that, and all three of them look back at the door.

“They’re here,” Halsey says quietly, forgetting about her wrath and attacking Michael, her tone with unnerving finality that makes Michael hold his breath and his eyes burn again.

He looks at Luke. And Luke sighs, nodding, and says: “Alright.”

Michael’s still sitting on the bed, and he glances at the blanket, feeling an irrational urge to tug at it, cover his shoulders in the thing, make it so maybe it becomes a cloak, and nobody sees him, and he doesn’t have to take part in anything. Halsey, closer to him, on a high-waist blue skirt that matches the metallic tone of her hair, and a black tank top, presses her lips together, and Luke, to her left, walks to the bag on the floor.

First he gets his goggles. Then, the blow-torch. Holding both in one hand, he walks to Michael with a small black gun. He breathes in and out slowly, and then presses the gun to Michael’s hands.

“I know you don’t want to fight, but just in case,” he says, tentative.

Michael holds the gun in his hands, notices they’re shaking against the cool metal, hands wrapping against Luke’s, stopping him from leaving, because he’s scared and shaking and he can’t be alone right now, not even in the same room as other two people. He needs to be touched and reassured that they’re not going to die. He needs something, and he isn’t sure just what it is yet, until he curls his hand around Luke’s neck to bring him closer, and collides his lips against Luke’s. Halsey sighs heavily close to them, snorts in contempt, but Michael doesn’t give a shit. It’s the only thing keeping him from a meltdown, this one kiss, and it does make him remember to keep breathing, when Luke sucks on his bottom lip softly, pulls away just a bit, just to go and peck at his lips again.

There’s a silly smile on his lips when Luke pulls away for good, leaving Michael on the bed with the gun. “Thank you,” he says, still quiet enough that maybe Halsey doesn’t listen, or maybe she just makes herself not listen. She walks away from them, closer to the door, and Michael frowns.

“Don’t say that,” Michael begs, a whine in his tone even if he won’t admit it. 

Luke smirks. “You were my first everything. You’re the reason I got to live for so long. Without you and the prophecy, I’d have starved to death when I was just a child,” he says, and his smile is so bright, so beautiful, that Michael wants to yell at him. Instead he just shakes his head, vehemently so, because Luke’s still a child, and he needs to stop talking about dying when he isn’t saying the words. “You saved me.”

“Stop,” he says, again.

Luke gives him a sad little smile, and stops.

Something shifts in Luke’s expression and the atmosphere. Halsey looks at them over her shoulder, like she senses the smirk on Luke’s lips coming. It arrives with a glint of mischief, even, and holding the blow-torch closer to his scarred naked chest, he raises his eyebrows. He puts the strap of the blow-torch on one of his shoulders, and Halsey hands him a machine-gun, probably retrieved from the bag, and Luke puts the strap over his other shoulder. “Now the fun begins,” he winks, and walks away from Michael, adjusting the goggles in his head.

Useless, getting on his knees on the bed, holding that black gun in his hands he doesn’t even know how to properly, he looks at the blue-haired girl. “How about you? Don’t you need a gun?”

She snorts, but the sparkle in Luke’s eyes has reached her, too. There’s less annoyance in her expression, more of just something else. Something that Michael can’t read, and makes him all the more nervous, but she smiles. “Oh, I don’t do guns.” And then she blinks, and her eyes are all white, opaque and intense, like the cloudiest of days.

Michael sits back in bed, pressing his lips together, frown deepening. 

“I bet I can kill more than you,” Luke tells Halsey, the back of his blow-torch bumping to her shoulder playfully.

She scoffs. “You wish, mission-fucker,” she says, and looks up at him. 

For a tiny second there, their eyes connect, and they smile at each other.

Then comes the first bang against the door.

The pair is way closer to the door than Michael, so it doesn’t affect him as much when they explode something in the wall right next to the door. The door is sealed shut, but Luke couldn’t do a thing about the walls, and as one crumbles down and the fog of dust comes up, Michael feels himself shrink, shoulders going up and forward as he tries and shields his body with just himself.

He holds the gun tight in his hands, and watches the show unfold.

The fog is thick enough that he can’t see what lies ahead, but Luke, with his goggles, can. Halsey stays back, takes a couple of disoriented steps backwards as Luke, in all ridiculousness of his bare feet and chest, grey sweatpants used for sleep, and deadly weapons, comes forward. There are heavy footsteps, so many of them, and then there’s the noise of a machine gun. Michael’s heart sinks on spot, and he widens his eyes, but Halsey’s still alive and she’s rolling her eyes at him and his reaction, so Michael figures it’s Luke shooting.

He sits back, squinting his eyes to see something, and that’s when the fog of the explosion starts to dissipate.

Only one plane has landed so far, the other two soaring in the air like weightless paperplanes at least ten feet above them. Michael frowns, but then his eyes go down, and he sees the plane on the ground, landed abruptly on top of siren-sounding cars. Nobody screams, though, everyone knows the drill: to leave silently but surely, getting the hell out of there, let the Order do their job.

Let the Order Vultures collect who they’re there to collect. A rescue team that, based on its name, doesn’t care much on whether the rescued is alive or dead and rotting.

The fog still thick in the air but no longer making him not be able to see, he first registers Luke emptying his clip on military men and women dressed in white and pointing guns at them. Michael’s too surprised at how many go down without any shield or protection against simple bullets to be shocked at their probable deaths. It’s maybe ten or fifteen down, grunting or unmoving, blood on their chests and heads and painting the brown ground a shade too red. There’s still a good twenty or so of them, and then Luke drops the useless machine gun to the ground, and takes the blow-torch in his hands.

That’s when Halsey comes forward, shakes her head, says, loudly: “Let’s play without guns,” and both of her hands go up abruptly, and the guns leave the guards’ hands. “Show me your eyes,” she says, sounding hungry, even, and Michael hears Luke chuckle.

He isn’t chuckling. He’s terrified and shrunk and hugging his knees.

Michael can’t look at the soldiers’ faces. They have masks and helmets and still Michael imagines every single one of them in the split second it takes for them to take tentative steps back, with no guns to protect them against the two witches anymore.

Luke’s blow-torch only works for close encounters, but they don’t come any close.

They stay back, their guns still in the air, and Halsey lets out an annoyed, “Huh,” before her finger swirls, and the guns point back at them.

“They’re humans,” Luke says, loudly, to her, “their first plane was full of humans. Why the fuck would they do that, Halz,” he says, the fun drained out of his voice. 

“I don’t know,” she says, and then one of her hand goes abruptly back, and all the triggers in all the guns are pulled. The twenty or so remaining men and women fall to the floor, shot in the head, powerless and lifeless.

Michael thinks he’s going to throw up.

Halsey walks to Luke slowly. The dust finally settles, and Michael watches it like a movie, trying to detach himself from the scene, so he stops tasting bile in his tongue. In front of them, the second plane goes down, but it doesn’t touch the ground. It hovers just above it, for a second silent and peaceful, and then they look at each other, knowingly.

Michael doesn’t need Luke yelling at him to get down to understand what comes next.

Still Michael’s surprised at how fast they work, how they must’ve done this countless times together if one jumps to each side and Halsey’s white eyes seem to almost glow in the sudden darkness of the room as her hands gesture wildly in the air, Michael’s long-forgotten bed flipping as a barrier. Michael’s the first to go behind it, closer, and then Halsey. Luke doesn’t get there in time, not quite, and she grabs him by the shoulder, nails digging against his skin as she drags him closer, desperate and quick.

The three of them behind the flipped bed, Michael takes a deep breath, hearing the machinery working as the guns go up to position themselves against them. Luke breathes hard with his back against the wood of the bed, and blinking his eyes black, he raises both hands. The back of the bed starts to get thicker, the smallest of screws expanding and leaving their places to make for a thin shield of metal between the bed frame and them. 

To Halsey’s other side, Michael stares, wide-eyed and with his throat dry. 

Just like it happened to him the first time he used his magick, the skin between Luke’s fingers start to part and bleed. Droplets of blood connect between his fingers until it licks down his palms, but Michael doesn’t stop him, and neither does Halsey. It’s either that, or they all die.

Michael wants to cry so bad.

His shaking hands grab a tighter hold of the gun, and Luke breathes out heavily, struggling to not let his body fall against the flipped bed. The second they lock eyes, Luke’s newly blue eyes with the corners red in exhaustion, Michael with his terrified green, is when the shooting starts.

The impulse of the insistent countless bullets is too much pressure, easily draws the bed back, and Halsey swears under her breath and keeps her hands lifted, forcing the metal-covered bed back when it’s forced on them. They still end up trapped in a corner of the room, though, breathing hard, the uneven rows of dots to be connected, the deafening sound of the plane machinery emptying their clips on them, hoping they’re all killed in the process… Michael can’t make sense of any of it. He presses his lips and searches Luke’s eyes, but he’s holding the metal back, his shoulder pressed against it, fists covered in blood, knees dirty against the carpet and his gray sweatpants becoming a different color. 

“They wanted you to use all your ammo on the humans,” Michael tells Luke, urgent and tear-eyed. 

Luke smirks at him, breathes out heavily as the bullets keep forcing the bed against him, still going at full volume and strength. “Guess they didn’t count on my blow-torch and Halsey’s magick, then, right?” 

Michael frowns down at his hands, at the gun in them. 

And the shooting stops.

Halsey sighs, falling to the side and to Luke’s arms. He catches her easily, the exercise of trust so pathetic for people who’ve relied on each other to keep their lives. It blows Michael’s mind that any of them could be willing to kill the other. But that’s not what he says. What he says, watching as Luke keeps one arm around her as she regains composure and strength and looks over the flipped bed, is: “How can I help?”

Luke doesn’t reply to him. Instead he keeps his eyes ahead, and tells Halsey: “There’s a whole team in this plane. I think it’s an extraction team. They’re saving the big guns for resistance, Halz,” he pauses, presses his lips. “We need a plan.”

Her eyes fall on Michael, almost questioningly, and then her mouth eases into a smile. “I have one. But I need to go back to my room. Do you trust me not to bail?” she asks, turning to Luke.

A bit dryly, he shrugs. “Well, pretty sure we’re all dying either way, just want to take as many of these ugly fuckers as we can, so if you do bail, you’re being smart. Not your forte, though,” he teases, and she flips him off. Michael almost, almost chuckles at that, at Luke’s self-righteous expression. “What do you need?”

“A distraction. I’ll leave through the window, but I can’t have anyone on my trail. I’ll make it as fast as possible, but,” she pauses, and looks at Michael.

And Michael nods at her. Before Luke can think about it and have any say in it at all, he nods, and does the one thing he’s sure will get their attention. After shoving the gun in Luke’s palm with a knowing smile that goes only one way, he stands up and away from the bed, raising both of his hands in surrender.

If they’d wanted him dead, they would’ve killed him back in the Prison. After today, he definitely doesn’t think it’s past them to kill at all. If there are no other options, he’s sure they’d rather take Michael back in a coffin than not take him back at all. But given the chance? They’ll take him alive.

The thrill that he feels in his veins as he raises his hands and tilts his head to the side, watching the extractor team, the Vultures, start his way, with their guns pointed at him, it’s impossible to describe. It’s like finally, after so long, he feels a tiny little bit in control. If anything, because they have a plan, and all eyes are on him.

They start his way like the wild animal that he is. One step too quick, and he’ll flee.

These ones are also wearing helmets, all ten or so of them, the exact same white uniform that the ones whose bodies were stepped on as this team made their way closer to Luke and into the ruined room. Still, even through the helmet, it isn’t hard to see it, when he gets too close to Michael, and he’s shot in the head.

He swallows back the bitterness in his tongue, the insistence on imagining who the man was before he had Luke’s bullet in his skull and was falling to the floor as life started escaping him. It makes him want to throw up again, but he holds his feet, only tilts his head to the other side with an inviting smirk. Puts on a show for whoever’s watching still up there in the sky, on the third plane.

They seem confused between pointing their guns at Michael or Luke. 

Their mistake is to waste any time at all in Michael. Luke’s got his gun loaded and is making every bullet count, each of them taking one man down. Michael feels something lick at his bare ankles, and almost, almost looks down. But he’ll see nothing. It comes from within, the vibration on his chest, the uneasiness heaving his shoulders down. It’s Chaos, begging to be part of this.

He won’t let it. 

And then he hears Luke calling out his name, and he knows it’s all gone to hell.

There isn’t much to do but to follow his instincts. He kicks to under the rug all of his thoughts of panic and death, and lets the next one come close enough that he grabs the barrel of his gun. The element of surprise allows him to punch the guy’s chin with the back of the gun. 

His heart is beating so, so hard against his chest. It’s doing that thing again, where it starts climbing up his throat.

He’s been in fights.

Never for his life, though.

Adrenaline runs through his veins like a drug. The man hit by him takes a step back, disoriented, and another starts Michael’s way, but never gets there. Luke’s at his side, the blow-torch in his hand, blue and orange fire leaving the end of it fiercely, the gun discarded and useless.

Luke burns the man’s back before he gets to Michael. He falls to the ground, and the heat is close enough to Michael that he feels it, too. Only this time, it doesn’t make him nervous. It makes him take another step closer to the he’s hit with the back of the gun, and he punches him in the face.

He falls, or stumbles back enough that he’s out of Michael’s eyesight, and he properly takes the gun in his hands. It feels heavy and unused, strange and cold, but he won’t let himself go there, about how these are all adults with years of training, and he’s a seventeen year old kid who’s learned to throw a punch in middle school. Instead he meets Luke’s eyes, and when Luke smirks at him that maniac killer smile that he has sometimes, Michael only chuckles, shaking his head, and taking the gun with both hands to aim level.

There’s another pair of men, but Luke takes care of them with the blow-torch, their scream echoing in the half-destroyed room. But they still fall, and Michael’s hands are still not back to shaking, so Michael’s counting his blessings and praying that maybe he and Luke don’t die today.

“C’mon,” Luke says, and tilts his head to the side, so Michael follows. 

They run out of the field of vision from the enormous hole opened in the wall, backing into a corner, and Luke pulls Michael so close, that for a second he thinks Luke’s going to kiss him. The euphoria of adrenaline and fear mixed together makes him so excited for that, that for a second there, he gets all of Luke’s oddly timed smirks and jokes about death and destruction.

But kissing isn’t what Luke had in mind. He keeps Michael to his other side on the wall, back against it so he can see when the new team approaches. They both know there can’t have been just ten if in the first plane there must’ve been at least twenty. 

It gets silent.

Silence makes Michael’s skin crawl.

Luke must feel similarly, because he frowns and presses his hand to Michael’s chest so he doesn’t move, and tilts his head to take a peek. As soon as he does that, he comes back, though, head thudding against the wall behind them with an empty laugh. He shuts his eyes, taking a deep breath, and Michael touches the hand still forgotten on his chest, squeezing Luke’s cold fingers to call him back to reality.

“Too bad?” he asks, quietly.

Snorting, he shrugs. “They got a very big guy coming our way.”

“How big?” Michael raises his eyebrows.

But the man comes into their field of vision, and Michael wishes he hadn’t asked.

Michael’s not a short boy. Luke’s even taller than him, by a couple of inches. And yet, the man taking a deep breath and shooting them a mean smirk, has got at least a foot on Luke. He’s got a reddish beard and a shaved head, a tattoo that spells something about Order on his neck, where the white uniform starts. His eyes are rolled back as his arms flex, and his magick is so obvious that Michael feels dumb for asking, as he raises his gun, asking: “So he’s like… super-strong or something?”

Luke sighs, adjusting the goggles on his face, and taking the first step towards him. “Or something, I guess.”

And the boy with the goggles and a blow-torch is walking straight to the juggernaut. 

“Hold the fuck up, Luke, God,” he grunts, and Luke does wait. He gives Michael a funny look, stopping just a step away from Michael. 

Michael aims.

And shoots.

The terrifying part isn’t how easy it is for him to shoot. It’s that it hits the man straight on the chest, and the bullet ricochets back. The man’s smirk grows wider, and Michael swears under his breath, grabbing Luke’s arm and taking one, two, three steps back.

He takes a deep breath, and so does Luke. 

The man just gives them a stare, like he’s feeding off their fear.

It sinks, that they really are going to die. 

Michael swallows back his heart, and with the hand that isn’t holding the gun, he reaches for Luke’s hand. Luke gives him the smallest of smiles before taking his hand. And it sort of feels alright, like maybe at least he didn’t die before finding out half of what the world was hiding from him, and that he got to taste Luke’s tongue in his and so just because of that, it wasn’t entirely pointless.

From where they’re standing, holding hands and feeling weirdly cathartic, they can’t see Halsey.

They can see the fire that comes, though; they can hear the deafening blast.

Her plan consisted of an explosive. One she rolled to the back of the plane, the explosion so wild and intense that it catches fire up. It ricochets everywhere, the fire engulfing the second plane, the alcohol in its engines making it go _boom_. It’s Michael who snaps out of it first, wrapping his arms around Luke and pulling him down to the floor. Shielding him with his body comes as a dumb knee-jerk reaction, eyes screwed up and tears collecting on the corner of his eyes with the smoke invading his nostrils and carbon gluing to his throat, his lungs, the inner side of his pale arms as he holds Luke and keeps him down.

It’s domino effect, fire licking every side of the room. When the coughing becomes too much and Michael opens his eyes, he squints his eyes to force the image into focus, looking over his shoulder. The man who was too big to be taken by either of them is falling backwards, insistent flames making his skin take a purple shade that makes Michael feel a little sick again.

But behind him, is just destruction. The plane’s been blown to pieces, just the biggest chunks lying around, scattered and burning. The plane that was still above has been brought to earth like a magnet attracted to metal. It looks like something could still be alive in it, though, just brought down unexpectedly but not so soon that whoever’s inside couldn’t have held on and saved themselves.

Halsey comes running to them, with a frown deep on her face.

It hits Michael, that she was worried they might’ve been caught in the explosion. That, sure, he’s Daryl’s son, her mission, and she can’t come back empty-handed to whatever place Daryl waits for them to return to, hiding from the Order. But there’s also Luke, and if it wasn’t already obvious enough, the look on her face as she searches the debris until she finds Luke, weirdly small in Michael’s arms, both of them knelt on the floor, that look gives it all away.

“I had a plan,” she says, as an after-thought, slowing down to a jog, and stopping right in front of them. Michael retrieves his hands from around Luke, and he takes a deep breath, looking at her. “I’m good with plans. Not so great at leaving.”

“None of us are, apparently,” he says, snorting, and stands up again, with a little wince, but a smile on his lips.

All screaming turns to grunts, the only noise is that silence that follows for a couple of seconds is of the fire, still using everything it can find as a combustible to keep going. From the walls of room 93 to the planes to human skin, it’s all just fuel. It makes Michael’s stomach flip, but then Luke winces again, and his eyes fall on him. His naked shoulders are bruised with trying to hold the flipped bed back before, his hands dark with blood and still a bit red. He touches Halsey’s shoulder reassuringly, and it’s red where he touches. 

She doesn’t notice. She chuckles, tucks some of her bright blue hair behind her ear, and Michael’s eyes tear up again, dumb and dull, tired but not enough to stop noticing small things, like how Luke still hasn’t turned off his blow-torch, and they’re not running, because it isn’t over yet.

“First plane had humans,” Michael starts, and the other two witches look at him. “Second had witches, but not as powerful as they could’ve been. That means the third plane is last resort.”

The horrifying nature of the situation doesn’t sink in yet. That’s for later, when he’s safe and feeling like visiting this room again to collect some new nightmares. What hits him is Luke’s exhausted eyes, still a bit red in the corners, and Halsey’s heavy sigh as she nods. There’s something about it, Michael thinks, about the resignation in the way she blinks and her eyes are white and violent, her expression hardened by the way she takes a step forward them, like she just knows, like she feels what’s coming next.

To an extent, they all do. None of them need The Trinity to know a thing or two about logic. An explosion like that may have killed everyone in the second plane, brought the third one forcefully down, and maybe on the fall some went down, too. But not all. Not possibly.

That thought does sink in at the time, hits him like a brick, that he’s hoping for someone else’s death, grasping to the hope that they’ve stopped breathing, leaving families and lovers behind.

It’s so fucking sick. But it’s also survival.

Quietly, he asks Halsey: “Is there another gun?” 

He doesn’t know why he asks. He’s not sure what he’d expected she’d say. But she just nods and with a cynical smile and her eyes all white, she points at the fallen bodies around them, and wordlessly, ignoring Luke’s eyes on him, Michael takes the first gun he sees, from the loose grip of the fingers of someone Luke burned to unconsciousness, before the explosion.

Michael clears his throat, and keeps looking ahead.

It doesn’t take long for the first figure to take shape.

Behind the first, come another three. Michael breathes in the smoke until he feels like he’s part of it, too, and he knows that if he was good enough with his magick, maybe he could just connect himself to the smoke, and choke those people to death. But he isn’t, and if he tries to, he’ll probably end up blowing up everyone around him.

But he could. It’s the first time that he allows himself to consider his magick for something as destructive as death. He pushes the thought to as far away from him as he can, kicks it away viciously. Killing a bird had paralyzed him. He can’t use his magick again if it kills a person.

Now, guns, that’s different, maybe.

If he isn’t feeling life drain out of someone’s bloodstream, then maybe it’s not the same.

They aren’t so tall, the four of them, with the exception of one, who looks like he’s about Luke’s height. He’s the first to make a move, too, smirking like he’s got a joke ready to roll off his tongue. It takes one look at his burned clothes but clear skin to realize why. The man, white eyed and with Hollywood-white perfect teeth, moves his hands around, and the flames open for him and his colleagues. They’d give him fire, the one thing he can manipulate.

By his side, he can hear Luke gasping, and when he turns to look, he sees the flames coming out of Luke’s blow-torch without his say-so, wild and heavier than it’d ever been under his control, trying to bite back, lick back at his hands. Stubborn, Luke doesn’t let go of the gun.

Michael’s about to yell at him to just let it fucking go when he feels something around his neck.

He chokes, tries coughing, hands going to his neck immediately, but there’s nothing there. It’s just air, and it’s refusing to go down his neck. His eyes watering, he looks ahead, and sees a woman, twice their age at least, brown hair in a tall ponytail, white eyes and an expressionless face, moving her hands around.

Falling to his knees, he keeps coughing, eyes watering until there are tears rolling down his cheeks.

Oxygen is a funny thing.

The world’s biggest treasure, taken for granted every single time, if he was asked.

Quickly the lack of oxygen makes his brain a funny place to be. He registers the sounds of Luke screaming, other voices mixed in the screaming. He hears fire eating up walls. Through the blurred version of reality that his eyes allow him, he still sees one of the women leaving the group and moving aside, going to what Michael assumes is still part of the parking lot. The fourth of them, carrying a big gun, walks through matter like it’s nothing. Fire, scrumbles, everything.

His brain doesn’t process any of that as danger.

What he notices, most urgently, is that he’s never seen the sea, and now he never will.

His throat feels like it’s closing in, trying to grasp around the thinnest bits of air it can hold on to, while the woman keeps the air out of him, blocks it from his nostrils, and tears are freely rolling down his cheeks now, but he still keeps his head up, still stares at her, even as he’s gasping with his mouth open, trying to steal some air that is too rebellious to be controlled by her.

He knows that very soon, he’ll lose consciousness.

But he never does. He watches a big scramble go up just behind her, and then, very abruptly, it hits the back of her head. She goes down, violently so, at least two feet forward. The blood flies even further, and for a terrifying moment, Michael thinks it’ll go on his face. But he’s fallen to the floor with his scraped knees against the ruins of where there was once an ugly carpet, and as he’s massaging his throat and still gasping for air, he remembers the coffee-looking stains in the ceiling. They’re gone forever, too.

The woman with the gun kneels down on the ground next to the dead telekinetic woman.

Halsey stops by his side, touches his shoulder. “You can keep going?” she asks. 

She saved him.

Michael nods silently, grabbing again the gun that he’d dropped to the ground.

“Luke,” he breathes out, like an urgent confession, and Halsey turns to look at the other side of the room at the same time as him. Luke’s breathing hard against a wall, is holding his blow-torch normally again, and the whole extension of his arm is burned to bright red, skin peeled away. 

He’s standing, though. That’s more than what can be said for the other man, lying on the ground, countless small screws and nails piercing his face, throat, and chest. To every deep cut of metal, another trail of blood that meets the floor.

So much blood, everywhere.

“His arm,” Michael says quietly, and he feels like crying again. Instead he presses his lips together, breathing in, and turns to Halsey with accusing eyes. “Why did you save me?! He was… He could’ve…!”

She snorts. “You think he cares about another scar? He’s _alive_ ,” she yells back at him.

And Luke must hear it, if the woman with the gun hears them, too.

Locking eyes with Halsey, she stands up. 

Even through the reasonable distance, Michael can see the tears wetting her face, the blood in her hands from where she touched the ruined body of what was once the nearly decapitated woman. The woman who almost killed Michael. Or maybe she wouldn’t, just get him unconscious and then take him. But it felt like dying. All those seconds or minutes where he couldn’t breathe at all, it felt like dying. The woman with her face distorting in anger as she looks at Halsey, though, she looks like she’s just lost a friend. Maybe more than that.

Michael shouldn’t be as surprised as he is.

The next seconds are slow-motion.

He tries screaming at Halsey to get down, but she must think she can strike back in time. She raises her hands, but she’s too slow. He hears Luke screaming at her, too, and Michael holds his breath, watching the woman walk through the scrumbles as if they’re just thin air, holding her gun and pointing it at Halsey. 

Then he feels Luke’s blood-stained hands shoving him down, and the woman shoots.

When the bullet lands, it isn’t on Halsey. It’s on Luke.

And then it isn’t slow-motion anymore. Then he’s painfully aware of how time doesn’t slow down, not even for times like these. Michael screams, and so does Halsey, falling down with Luke’s weight against her, and as they both fall to the floor, Michael’s shaking hands goes to Luke’s good but already bruised shoulder, his fingertips cold against the warm skin, his knees going back to the ground, too, bruising them deeper.

Even though his eyes are on Luke, the way his head falls to Halsey’s shoulder with a grunt, it’s Halsey’s terrified wide-eyes that Michael notices first. He ignores her, though, makes Luke look at him, and with a frown, Luke eventually turns his head to meet Michael’s eyes, then Halsey’s.

He’s got this small smile on his face.

Everything’s blurry. Michael’s a child. He’s fucking crying.

“Hey, I’m alright,” he says, and coughs, taking a deep breath. Halsey cups his face with her hands, and her hands are shaking so bad as she holds his face.

“I can’t lose you too,” she breathes out instead of saying.

Michael can’t say a single word, can’t even make his hand bring Luke closer to him. He’s stuck watching him in pain, making an absurd effort to meet Halsey’s eyes again, coughing some more before he says: “Promise me you’ll watch out for them, Halz.”

She’s mute, lips pressed together, head shaking no vehemently, ready to snap at him.

“Promise me,” he presses her, voice sounding firmer but also darker.

Snapping out of it, Michael swallows a sob, and asks quietly: “You’re not talking about me, are you? Because you’re not… You’re living. Don’t give me this shit.”

“I can’t, you know it’s not up to me,” she says, eyes welling up, and it doesn’t make Michael feel any better, how fast she starts crying, how fast her whole body starts shaking. “I can’t, I’m not strong enough, I’m not,” she tries, and Luke’s eyes beg.

The noise is the worst part, Michael thinks, all the noises.

The smell of blood has become apparently permanent in Michael’s nostrils, but the noises catch him off guard. It makes him wince back, when the woman shoots at Luke’s back again, and his shoulders shake, his body jerking forward against Halsey’s, shielding her, and he’s quiet but coughing up on blood, but Halsey and Michael aren’t. She sobs loudly, wrapping her hands around his neck, pressing her lips to his bloody cheek as he drops his head against her shoulder and shakes more.

Michael looks at the woman.

“Move the body away, I’m gonna kill you, bitch,” she yells.

The body. It’s not a body. It’s Luke. He’s still alive.

Still.

Michael stands up, long fingernails digging at his palms as his hands curl into fists. He breathes in all the pain, all the shaking in his heart, and blinks his eyes back. The world rolls back, too, bringing a confusing version to his field of vision as his shoulder blades reach back and his chest opens up to Chaos. 

He’s crying so hard that it’s hard to keep focus, but still he tries to connect to something, to anything. His magick is erratic and ricocheting against him as he tries to get to the woman, and he feels his palms bleeding, too, the nails digging too deep.

The noises, they always get such a fast response out of him.

The noise of a roaring engine makes him blink his eyes back to green. As he sees the jeep move forward and fast, his shoulders drop, and he still feels it in his throat, just how badly he wanted to… kill. But he doesn’t; doesn’t have to. The jeep moves through scrumbles that try and get in the way, but still take the woman away, and she doesn’t roll her eyes back in time to manipulate her own molecules and make it so the jeep runs past her. Instead it takes her, runs over her, and it’s so… it’s so fucking ugly, is the thing, how the body falls to the floor and she yells, and then still tries to grab her fallen gun with one leg stuck under a big black wheel. But Geordie’s on it already, a hand out of the window and pointing at the woman’s head, blowing her brains out with three direct shots.

Michael can’t look away.

Geordie leaves the car with the engine still on, runs to them. She looks so strange like this, all clean of blood and dirt, when they’re all a mess. But Geordie runs right past Michael and kneels down on the floor next to Halsey, who has Luke in her hands, and so the real world calls Michael back to the current tragedy, losing everything he’d only sort of gotten over the past week.

Michael’s bottom lip keeps quivering even as he tries to swallow back his sobs.

“You came back,” Halsey breathes out through her tears, one hand still around Luke, the other, covered in someone else’s blood, going around Geordie’s shoulders.

She gives Halsey a sad half-smile. “Told you I was going to the gas station for the pay phone.”

Michael does manage to swallow back his climbing heart when Luke turns to look at him, his eyes covered in tears, his mouth and chin wet and slick with his own blood.

“Can you two carry him?” he asks.

He doesn’t recognize his own voice, the tone too old and brave. Too something he isn’t.

Halsey just stares at him, confusedly, and Geordie seems to acknowledge him for the first time. “Where the fuck is his handcuff?” Geordie asks, eyes searching Halsey’s, but Halsey doesn’t look back at her, not yet. She just reluctantly nods at Michael.

“So come,” he says.

He allows himself one deep breath out, just to calm his nerves, tells himself he’s got this, and walks to the jeep just to get Geordie’s gun. Then he keeps walking, knowing that the girls and Luke are not far behind, and in firm steps full of purpose, he finds the one corner in the parking lot that he knew there’d be another witch waiting, in a hot-wired car.

The second her eyes land on him, her foot buries in the accelerator.

Michael shoots at the tires.

He doesn’t get it right the first or second time, hits the car far too many times, but it’s fast enough that she can go nowhere. And Michael knows in his heart, that if he had to shoot a thousand times more, he would, he still would.

“Fun fact Mum used to tell me whenever she went on any meeting outside of town with the Council: not to worry, Mike,” he raises his voice, out of control and high-pitched. “Not to worry at all!” he screams, stomps his foot, still going her way, and the witch stares, quiet and unmoving. “Every field mission of any type has a healer on board. Just in case,” he smirks an ugly smirk.

And she doesn’t smirk back. Her facial muscles don’t seem to move at all.

At this point, Halsey and Geordie are dragging Luke closely, and he’s so, so close to be out of reach, that it makes Michael’s heart speed up in a way that he feels like he’s certainly going to explode if he isn’t quick enough. He gestures at the girls to stop, and Luke grunts quietly, coughing more blood. Michael walks to the car in heavy steps, opens the door, hands wrapping tightly against her thin wrist and pulling her outside even as she tries kicking him away.

“I’m not going to!” she screams, but Michael ignores her, forces her out, drags her across the pavement when she tries resisting, biting his hand. It’s all useless. When Michael finally drops her to her knees in front of Luke, she turns to him, and spits at Michael. “I ain’t healing any Chaos witch. Would rather die.”

“If you don’t, God help me, you will,” Halsey says.

Michael believes it, but he doesn’t care, either. “There are worse things than death,” he says slowly, darkly. The spit doesn’t land on him, doesn’t even make him pissed. He’s just shaking and miserable and can’t stop crying, but his voice is back to that weird tone his ears aren’t used to when he kneels to her side, fingernails digging at her skin and tearing it as he tightens the grip on her arm. “I’m sure you’ve heard about me,” he half-smirks, his half-Chaos coming back to the surface, blinking reality away with one short breath. “I won’t kill you. But I’ll tear you apart from the inside. I can make it go for weeks.”

He believes his words, too, and at the moment, he also doesn’t care.

The woman hesitates, shaking against him, but then she murmurs something, and Michael lets go of her, blinking his eyes back again. He watches as she takes a deep breath, closes her eyes for a second, and when she opens her eyes, they’re white.

Michael wants to cry harder, the heaviness of his chest almost too much, but then her hands wrap around Luke’s wrists, and something happens. Luke jerks his head back against Halsey’s chest just behind him, and he shuts his eyes but his lips part, and he looks like he’s sort of gasping for air, only on reverse. He’s expelling air out like it’s poisonous, and maybe it is, the air in his lungs, the blood in his veins.

The woman winces in pain, but the grip only seems to tighten. 

Luke shakes against Halsey, and she wraps her arms around him even more, fingers running over his head to try and soothe it somehow. And slowly, enough that Michael could almost miss it if he wasn’t paying so close attention, Luke watches the skin crawl back over all his burned arm, inch by inch, until it doesn’t look like it was peeled back anymore.

Crying out again, the woman’s voice grows thicker and she coughs, but she doesn’t let go, and Luke shakes in Halsey’s embrace, tries to jerk away from her touch, but she keeps her hands firm, and when Luke cries a soft, “Please,” Michael isn’t sure if he’s begging her to continue or to stop.

Michael looks at Geordie, and she’s got this look on her face, like she’s freaked out.

But Michael can finally ease his crying, make his chest stop from crumbling down, too.

The woman finally lets go, and when she does, her hands are covered in blood and shaking. She breathes out heavily, blinking away tears, and Luke opens his eyes, blinking slowly, looking first at Michael, then at Geordie. But he doesn’t say anything. It’s Halsey who does, touching his face so he looks at her. She’s crying harder than she was before.

“You dumb fuck,” she says, smiling between sobs. “You took a bullet for me.”

Luke chuckles, but only coughs when he tries talking. Still he raises two fingers to her eye-sight, and she rolls her eyes, before pulling him into a tight hug.

The weak woman in front of them looks nauseated.

“I’ll kill her,” Geordie says, stepping forward.

But Michael shakes his head, blocks her path with his hand. She gives him an annoyed look, but doesn’t question it, not with how much bigger than her he is, and with the way he’s talked to the woman before. “No, she lives,” he starts, and Halsey and Luke turn to look at him, too. “She needs to take a very important message to the Council,” he pauses, raising his eyebrows. “Stop looking for us. Everyone who comes our way is going to die.”

Halsey murmurs something to Luke, maybe asking if he can stand, because the next thing they do, is help each other up. But Michael can feel Geordie’s strong presence next to him, with no guns but still somehow threatening, and it feels a little odd, standing side by side with someone who’s expressed desire to kill him just a few days ago, but not odd enough that he can look away from the woman.

She chuckles. From all things she could’ve done, she chuckles.

“I have a message for you too, half-Chaos boy,” she says, and coughs some more. She’s coughing blood like Luke was, too, and Michael doesn’t know the specifics of healers and how their magick works, but she doesn’t look to be in such a good shape now. She still finds it in her to cock an eyebrow as she tells Michael: “It’s from your Mum.”

It’s like a slap across the face.

He freezes, and the world doesn’t freeze with him.

“Don’t listen to her,” Halsey says, breathing hard. “She’s lying, Michael.”

The woman turns to look at Halsey, with a mean smirk on her lips. “Am I?” she frowns, then looks back at Michael, looking every bit of cynical and resilient as every adult Order witch who’s crossed paths with him ever had. “Karen wanted you to know something. She thought I may run into you, just didn’t anticipate the whole threatening to kill me thing.”

Geordie touches Michael’s arm. It’s the first time she touches him, alarming and firm, and the first thought that occurs to Michael, is that he still doesn’t know what the fuck she is, Chaos or Order. “Karen Gordon is out of the Council, you should know. She’s not under arrest, but the Council is trying to find something to put her away for,” she starts. Then she blinks a couple of times, looks back at the others, and adds: “Come to think about it, I don’t know what’s taking them so long.” Then, back at Michael: “But she definitely doesn’t have the power to send any messages.”

But he doesn’t move. Can’t possibly move away, or blink, or breathe.

The woman takes a deep breath, like it’s hard to talk, and clears her throat a little awkwardly before talking again. “Said she knew,” she pauses, licks her blood-red lips. “That’s why she wanted to give you a ride that day, try to make the most of her last minutes with you, or something,” she shrugs, like she doesn’t get it, and then: “She’s sorry. Says she misses you.”

“Mum…” he breathes out, and his eyes start filling up again.

He’s such a child. He wishes he could stop crying.

“Michael, she’s just playing with your head,” Geordie decides, and she hadn’t called him by his name before, either. It feels weirdly validating, in a way that it also makes his stomach sink. He turns to her, with his tear-filled eyes, and she shakes her head, as if signaling the lie.

But they don’t know about the car ride. 

She used to never drive him to school at all.

“We have to go,” Luke says, breathing out, tired. “The jeep still working?”

Geordie nods. And Michael meets his eyes.

He thought Luke would die. He thought they were all going to die. 

Michael swallows back tears and the woman’s message, starts ahead leaving the woman behind, and over his shoulder, to his unlikely allies, he says: “Let’s go.”


	10. we run on gasoline

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so, so much for all the support. you guys are true rock stars.   
> [blazersandbarricades](http://blazersandbarricades.tumblr.com/) did something especially badass, and i wanted to share that with you. she made a fanmix for opia!!!! with annotations and all!!!!! please check it out [here](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/129372683150/blazersandbarricades-cheap-motels-magick) and be sure to leave her a lot of love. i'm super in love with it, and can't stop listening (◡‿◡✿) alright, here's the new chapter! happy reading~~ ♥

They don’t go directly to the jeep. As soon as Luke gives the first few steps in the direction of where Geordie ran over the woman, he remembers his blow-torch, and goes back for it. Michael follows him, quiet and a few steps back, ignoring the corpses covering the ground, all the blood making a foul smell rise already. The Vultures, and guess who’s going to clean the pavement with their beaks.

He presses his lips together, runs his dirty hand over his dirty hair, and though his heart shatters with all the violence, his mind’s weirdly peaceful. 

Luke picks up the blow-torch from where Michael saw him die in Halsey’s arms. 

Michael stays behind for a second, gives him a second to wrap his arms around it like he’s hugging a stuffed animal, and then he walks to where his bag still is, retrieves the briefcase from inside, and fumbles through what’s inside to see the state his clothes are in. Michael clears his throat, if anything because it feels too weird to watch him without being noticed.

Not moving to look back, Luke sighs, says, “I wish you hadn’t come back. There’s nothing good to see here, and Geordie and Halsey won’t hurt you. Now at least, they won’t,” he chuckles, but his heart’s not in it, and his hands are still busy with going through his bag, trying to decide if there’s anything in there worth taking the bag with them.

“I came back for something,” Michael says, finally, and looks away from him.

On the floor, kicked to a corner but a survivor against the fire that engulfed almost all of room 93 when Halsey blew up that explosive, he finds the blanket that fell from the bed when Halsey flipped it and Luke made the metal in it bend and expand until it was a shield. Walking through the scrumbles and bodies like they’re bad furniture he should avoid, he takes the blanket in his hands.

Luke doesn’t question him. 

Good thing, too, because Michael doesn’t know what he’d say.

“Can we go?” Luke says.

It’s alarming, how close he is, how Michael didn’t even notice him moving, getting closer, and then he turns around and Luke’s standing right behind him, holding his bag with the briefcase in one hand, the blow-torch in the other. Michael gives him a look, at his bare and dirty scarred chest but that doesn’t look hurt any longer. His arms, the poor state of his sweatpants that are ripped bad on the knees, stained with blood where he’d cut his skin before, but now there isn’t any pain anymore. His feet are bare and that’ll probably give him some wounds later for walking over the ground like this, but other than that, he’s the most okay of them all. Physically, anyway.

Michael takes a deep breath, looking at him, holding the blanket in his hands so tight that his knuckles turn white. Sure they can go. They should be gone already. Something of the proportions of their battle is going to attract attention fast, plus the Order witch healer is still alive in the parking lot. They need to move.

But.

Sighing again, he feels his body work before his mind. He takes another step toward Luke, tentative and tired, and holding the blanket in only one hand, he touches the small of Luke’s back, letting his face drop to his shoulder, their bodies getting closer.

Luke can’t hold him back, not with his hands so busy, but he still tries. There’s a murmur of, “Mikey,” coming from his lips, but Michael isn’t paying attention to words. He’s paying attention to the healthy warmth of Luke’s skin against his cold fingertips that shook and shook until they were firm against the trigger of a gun, and then another, and then someone’s wrist. He’s paying attention to the smell of death getting confused with Luke’s insistent scent that survived Michael’s three nights of sleep in the blanket when they first got to the motel, his face pressed to his shoulder, head dropped, body so unwilling to put any effort into anything. “We have to go,” Luke says softly, the hand with the blow-torch rising to touch his waist, and the weapon is cold against Michael’s skin where it touches him, but he doesn’t care about that, either.

He just nods, and pulls away, putting some distance between them. “Yeah, let’s go.”

* * *

Geordie’s the one behind the steering wheel when they get to the jeep. Halsey’s sitting on the other side, and she has her heart-shaped sunglasses on, and is chewing bubble gum. Geordie’s dirty blond hair is pulled up in a loose and messy bun, and looking at them, if it wasn’t for the splashes of blood up Geordie’s arm from blowing that woman’s brains out, and for all of Halsey’s clothes and her arms to be stained in red, Michael would say they’re just a couple of friends going somewhere for fun. 

He chuckles as he shakes his head and opens the backseat door for himself.

The last time he’d gotten in this jeep, he’d been handcuffed and so shocked that Daryl had sent people to break him out of prison that he’d barely managed to react. It had sort of felt like an out of body experience, in the same way that his stay at the Order prison had been. Looking back now, maybe it wasn’t shock. Maybe it was just the stuff they injected him with and kept him from sleeping. He wonders if one day he’ll remember everything. 

He hopes he won’t.

Luke sits next to him and closes the door behind him. There’s a respectable distance between them, and Michael sort of wishes there wasn’t, but he won’t push it, won’t say a thing. Luke shoves his bag under the seats, where, now fully lucid, Michael sees there’s an opening that looks like the jeep is sort of broken in parts. It’s probably Geordie’s, not something Daryl sent for them.

“Well, everyone’s here,” Luke says, reticent, then adds: “Why’s the engine not on yet?”

Geordie gives him a look from the rearview mirror.

“We need to talk.”

Michael sighs heavily, tilting his head to the side so hopefully he can get in Geordie’s field of vision through the reflection of the mirror. Halsey’s quiet, the shades of her sunglasses making it impossible for Michael to know where she’s looking at, but he bets it’s out the window, at the debris he wants distance from. And he guesses they’ve discussed what is it that they need to talk while Luke and Michael were in the ruined room 93. He’s still holding the blanket in his hands, covering his scraped knees with the thing, not even minding that much at the roughness against his fragile skin. Maybe it isn’t that fragile anymore.

“Listen,” Michael starts, and Geordie does look at him. “I didn’t make Luke do anything. I didn’t _seduce_ him, and I’m not _using_ him,” he snorts, shooting Halsey in specific a look.

Geordie only frowns at him.

“Tone down your self-importance. This isn’t about you,” she says, serious and, Michael notices, a little disgusted. Michael parts his lips, his cheeks reddening as his face heats up, and then Geordie goes on: “So I did manage to talk to Dylan while I was at the gas station, before I heard people talking about the motel and I drove back here.”

“Dylan and Ashton,” Luke says, quietly, as a knee-jerk reaction.

Michael presses his lips to seal them shut.

“He’s safe for now, set someone up and the guy was taken, too much evidence he was working with Chaos, couldn’t be refuted, and nobody suspects anyone anymore, because they think they have their guy,” she says.

Halsey blows out a big pink bubble, then it pops, and she sucks it back in.

Luke frowns. “Why don’t you sound happy, Geordie?”

“Because Ashton’s execution is scheduled for tomorrow morning,” she answers, almost redundantly, as if Luke was expected to know. She breathes out shortly, and then turns around to look Luke in the eye. Michael looks at Luke, too, but can’t read his expression. “Can you get your pet to behave?”

Michael snorts. “I’m,” he shakes his head. “I’m not his pet! And I’m not doing anything!”

“Yeah,” Luke says, firmly, not looking away from Geordie.

So Geordie nods, taking a deep breath, and straightens her back so she’s facing forward again. She turns the key in the ignition, and buries her foot in the accelerator. “Let’s break yet another annoying kid out of prison, then.”

* * *

Michael’s got his forehead against the window of the jeep, staring out at the sunset with a blank expression and a turmoil in his head. He keeps kicking it aside, though, but it only ricochets and comes back, so he decides to just stop trying so hard to stop thinking about it, and let the thoughts come to him, trying not to get too attached to any.

He’s a murderer. He was present in a blood bath. Four teenagers managed to end three military teams of adults. Chaos is evil. Order is evil. Everyone’s evil, including him, and if both Chaos and Order are bad, then he isn’t only half-bad. He’s full-bad and the his head keeps pounding. Luke died and then he didn’t. Halsey wanted him dead and then she saved him. Geordie left them all to die and then saved them from doom. Karen knew all along and she still let them take him. Why did she let them take Michael? Where’s Karen now? Daryl’s waiting for him.

It’s silent in the car. 

In the first twenty minutes, there was small murmurs between Geordie and Halsey that could pass as chattering, but mostly Geordie just kept driving, Halsey kept chewing her gum, and Luke kept fidgeting with his goggles, still shirtless and barefeet, still looking like an overgrown child who needs a shower and love. The blanket over his legs keeps Michael warm on the outside, but he still feels cold in the silence that follows after, like it makes his thoughts louder.

Eventually comes the awkward noise of Luke clearing his throat, and when Michael looks at him, he’s frowning and staring down. Michael blinks a couple of times, unsure, and he sort of wants to just… reach and touch and kiss and hug and make him empty promises that everything’s going to be alright, even though he isn’t so sure he’s alright himself. But, again, he doesn’t want to push, especially not with the two girls in the front seats.

Michael still shifts on his seat, keeping the blanket over his legs but not leaning against the window anymore. He star-fishes his hands on both of his sides, holding his breath for a moment, looking at him, trying to read past his frown and the stains of dry blood that lick down his chin and Adam’s apple. 

Luke’s eyes stare away from the floor of the car and to Michael’s hand, the one closest to him. And not very smoothly at all, he covers Michael’s hand with his, and then gives him a look, alarmed and wide-eyed, like this scares him more than all the blood he’s spilled less than an hour ago, the blood coming from others and from himself.

Michael chuckles lowly, moves his fingers between Luke’s so they’re intertwined.

Worry seems to wash away from Luke’s expression, then. Michael bites back a smile, Luke breathing out heavily like he’d been holding his breath. Michael decides to also send to hell his thoughts about restraint and holding back, and moves closer to him, shifting on the seat until he’s sitting right next to him, sharing his blanket with Luke, adjusting it with a focused frown as he tucks the blanket under Luke’s thighs on one side, his bent knees resting on Luke’s other thigh as he snuggles closer to him, still frowning as he takes a deep breath, and looks at him.

Luke has this expression on his face, like he’s somehow proud. It makes Michael roll his eyes with a small smile, shaking his head and then resting it on Luke’s shoulder. Luke wraps both his arms around his shoulders, kisses his forehead, and Michael keeps quiet for another second.

He can feel the weight of Geordie’s eyes on them through the windshield mirror.

Not that he cares.

“How are you, Mikey?” he asks, so quiet it’s a whisper.

Michael presses his lips together, and considers this. “It was the bad guys, right? That we killed,” he adds, as an after-thought, looking down at his hand, at what it looks like restrained on his own knees, suddenly too shy to touch Luke’s naked chest. “I just keep thinking that they had families and people who cared for them and I need to know they were the bad guys, because then it doesn’t matter.”

Luke doesn’t respond immediately. It takes him a moment, thinking about it, rubbing his shoulder soothingly but without a word, keeping him close and warm. Then, eventually, he says: “I can’t do that. I can’t tell you they were bad guys. There are no bad guys at all. But if it changes anything, that also wasn’t for sport. That was for survival.”

And Michael considers that, too. 

Relaxing against him tentatively, little by little, he makes his hand touch Luke’s scarred chest, fingertips just ghosting over the skin until he settles and slides down to his stomach, just to snake around his waist, closing his eyes and breathing out heavily.

“You should sleep a little. We still have a few hours to go before we reach the city,” Luke says.

With his eyes still closed, he asks: “Is this worth it, going back to the capital?”

He feels Luke shrug. “It’s risky and dangerous, and it’s a bit of a shot in the dark. We’re traveling at night so even if they send in more Vultures, they can’t see us. It’s our best shot, but even then, chances aren’t that good. But it’s not about whether it’s worth it. Ashton’s our friend. We have to.”

Michael nods. 

He wonders, if things had been different, if Calum would ever go in a kamikaze mission like this for him. Michael doubts that.

* * *

Across from Michael, David covers Joy’s hand with his, and gives her a loving smile.

Michael wants to throw up.

Having dinner at the Hood house has become more a necessity than a choice once he turns sixteen and Karen’s promoted to full-time Council member. What he doesn’t get, though, is how that makes her travel so much, be out of the city more often than she isn’t, when both of Calum’s parents are in the Council and they always manage to have dinner together.

David is fine, Michael thinks. As soon as he’s in the house, he’s out of his white uniform and into comfortable-looking clothes, and he cracks a joke or two about his day, asks Calum and Mali-koa about theirs. But Joy sort of creeps Michael out a bit. Calum told him once, that when Joy’s eyes roll back in white, she can communicate to the dead, as long as she can smell their death. That’s why she travels more than David. Sometimes they take her to a place of killing, so they can learn more about the people whose bodies are lifeless and scattered on battle ground.

Michael can’t think of a more horrifying magick, but Joy’s a classy woman who knows how to deal with her variety of cutlery, and has a kind smile whenever she catches Michael looking at her.

Still, Michael thinks her magick is a little weird.

Though he doesn’t know what their dinners together were like before Karen started asking the family to have Michael over for dinner whenever she traveled, which was increasingly often, arguing that he was so helpless at cooking, but they go more or less the same since he started staying. They all say their graces -- even Michael, though he feels particularly silly for expressing gratitude that he didn’t completely flunk his test or that he found five bucks in his backpack -- and before everyone starts eating, David always covers Joy’s hand with his and smiles at her.

They’re such a show-off couple. Their love is smothering in a way that makes Michael too self-conscious of what his family is not. It always makes him sick, and he always looks away. Joy probably thinks he’s flustered by watching a couple so happily married, but in truth, he’s repressing thoughts of flipping their dinner table and spitting on their plates.

“How was your day?” David asks to the three of them, Mali-koa, Calum, and Michael.

According to Calum, this is when David stops paying attention.

Mali-koa clears her throat. She always goes first. “Major Banks is considering retirement. If that happens, I may get some sort of promotion, but my team’s still training. I have some problems of negligence with this one woman, but I think it’s manageable. I’m making sure she stops with the sloppiness,” Mali-koa half-smiles, raises her eyes to meet David’s. It’s a little pathetic, Michael thinks, to watch her staring at him, looking for validation, as he nods without much interest, still holding his wife’s hand. Her smile eventually falters, and she clears her throat again. “All in all, a good day.”

Joy gives her a content little smile, but if Michael was a betting person, he’d put all his money on Joy not having heard a single word her daughter’s just said.

Calum goes next, because Michael wouldn’t dare mess up their Happy Family dynamic. He gives Michael one look, then looks down at his plate again, playing with the food. “I asked a girl out.” 

Even though that can’t possibly be more interesting than what Mali-koa’s just said, it picks their interest. Joy and David exchange a look, and then David’s chuckling, saying: “Who’s the lucky girl?”

Michael shakes his head at the absurdity, but only Mali-koa catches the look in his eye.

“It’s Maddy Harris, you guys know her Mum,” Calum rolls his eyes, a little embarrassed, but indulging them anyway. “She’s our friend, and, well, anyway, I’ve had a crush for forever, so I thought why not, right?” he raises his eyes, and it lands directly on Mali-koa.

And Michael sighs, because it isn’t just her. They’re all pathetic and dependant on each other’s approval, only they depend on different people within the same group, and it’ll never be mutual. Mali-koa’s still narrowing her eyes and blinks the frown away with a vague smile, but she’s probably stopped paying attention when David and Joy started.

“Oh, her Mum is such a brilliant physicist,” David smiles quietly, squeezing his wife’s hand and finally letting go to take a sip of his water.

Joy tilts her head to the side, eyes still on Calum demandingly. “Well, what did she say?”

“Yes,” Calum says with a cheeky smile.

And they celebrate, sort of.

Joy and David give each other approving smiles and then Calum. And Mali-koa pretends like she doesn’t hate it as much as Michael pretends like he doesn’t, and because no one pressures him to say how was his day, he doesn’t tell anyone he felt like punching his best friend into oblivion just because he was so jealous.

* * *

Michael opens his eyes with light almost directly on him. It makes his skin crawl, the idea of the sun already up and them already in the capital, or worse yet, being where someone can reach them. It’s worse that he can’t feel Luke’s solid presence next to him, makes him nervous, blinking a couple of times and looking around. He’s still in the car, breathing suddenly hard and alarmed, and Geordie’s in the driver’s seat, playing with the car keys in her hands.

“Where’s,” he starts, but she cuts him off, giving him a brief look through the rearview mirror.

“We were almost out of gas,” she explains. 

Looking out the window, he sees the light doesn’t come from the sky, but from the big lamps of the gas station. They’re parked in front of the convenience store now, though, and Michael presses his lips together, still unsure, but Geordie doesn’t look so threatening under this light.

“Your arm’s not covered in blood anymore,” he notes, quietly, frowning and staring.

He hopes his stare comes as challenging. But she doesn’t even look his way, only shrugs and says: “I cleaned myself in the bathroom. There’s where Luke and Halsey are, I think, or buying some food. Luke was gonna wake you up to get cleaned if you’d like after he came back.”

“Ah.”

The awkward silence expands for a couple of seconds. Michael clears his throat and folds the blanket on his lap, and all the time Geordie keeps playing with her keys. He isn’t sure what he’d expected, that she’d open her heart like Luke had, or that she’d be explosive like Halsey had. Both are wrong. She doesn’t seem to care about his presence there at all.

That’s somehow more unnerving than Halsey’s outbursts. 

He licks his lips and sighs heavily. 

Geordie keeps playing with the damn keys.

“So are you like… an Order witch like Halsey, or?” he tries. And as she pauses and gives him an unimpressed look through the rearview mirror again, he realizes he doesn’t have any idea why he’s trying to start conversation. She’s rude and wanted to kill him on spot. But still.

“I’m human,” she says, holding her gaze.

That’s the part that Michael doesn’t really get.

Because if she was lying, she’d surely come up with something more clever than that. But if she isn’t lying, then he isn’t sure how come she’s qualified to be on Daryl’s little extraction team. Though Luke doesn’t have amazing magick, he still has a blow-torch and a maniac smile. Halsey’s one of the most powerful witches Michael’s met, even though she doesn’t have many years on him, her telekinesis control is still more impressive than many of the adults he’s seen in his life. But Geordie, as a human, being in this, it doesn’t make much sense.

Though, to be fair, not much has made any sense since he was arrested six months ago.

“You’re human,” he repeats, slowly, narrowing his eyes.

“I’m human,” she says again, and unfazed, she turns around to look him in the eye and not through the mirror reflection anymore, and says, with a small smile. “I’m an assassin. Trained to kill, very effective. No magick can stop bullets,” she winks.

Michael raises his eyebrows.

“You said something about Mum,” he blurts out.

It makes her frown, lips parting with the suddenness of it. It’s just that he can’t control his tongue anymore than she can control the surprise in her eyes, especially now, especially after seeing _this_ , this side of him. But Michael figures that if she didn’t kill him before, she won’t now. And if she is, in fact, an assassin for hire, working for Daryl just because, then at least she doesn’t have any business keeping the truth from him. Wouldn’t care enough to protect him from it, either.

“Yeah,” she says, still looking a little lost. “I said all I know. She’s out of the Council. She’s not in prison yet. All I know is from Dylan, though. The Council’s growing restless, but they can’t put her in jail for some reason.”

Michael looks away from her, down at his lap. “Have they replaced her?”

“Replaced her?” Geordie echoes him, frowning.

“Yeah. The Council’s supposed to be five people. It was always the Hood couple, Mum, Brown and Nijak. Did they replace Mum?”

Geordie shrugs, shaking her head quietly. “No clue, dude. Dylan didn’t mention anything.”

The thing about Nijak is that she’s always had a soft spot for Karen and Michael. She’d smile at them and touch Karen’s arm in a reassuring way whenever she looked like she’d burst. She was the one who was always traveling with Karen all around the country, sometimes overseas. If Michael had to guess, he’d say that Nijak is the one who’s keeping her away from any trial. The Hoods would probably be against her, since their children were so quick to turn on Michael. 

Now, Brown, Michael doesn’t know. He went to school with his daughter, a competitive girl with a tall ponytail and raised eyebrows that told you she was better than you. Eki was a year older than him and Calum in school, Michael hasn’t seen her in years, but growing up with her around, especially knowing her father and Karen were colleagues, was hell.

He absolutely hated any Council members event where he had to be around her.

But he has no idea where Brown stands with the Karen situation.

They’re quiet for a moment, Michael looking back at his calloused hands still dirty, his clothes a mess, and Geordie doesn’t bother to offer him a distraction. If he’s honest, he doesn’t blame her. She owns him nothing, he supposes.

Luke and Halsey come back to the jeep together not long after. Her hair is wet and looks freshly washed, but her shoulders are damp and so is her T-shirt, a crop-top that reads WELCOME TO BADLANDS, a reference to the times of chaos when witches still lived in hiding. It was so long ago, nobody even talks about it in school. Michael ignores her shirt, and looks at Luke just behind her. He’s in clean clothes, his combat boots, black skinny jeans, and a black sleeveless shirt with the white stripes of a backpack contrasting against it. He’s got the goggles on his head, but his hair is wet. He’s smiling and carrying a bag of chips on his hand. When his eyes land on Michael, he smiles so, so big, that Michael’s only option is to smile back.

“I stole something for you,” Halsey says, opening the passenger seat next to Geordie. She’s smiling big, too, excited or just delusional that they might as well be walking into a suicide mission. Geordie chuckles and raises her eyebrows, but then Michael stops paying attention to them. Luke’s opening the door of the jeep and offering his hand to help Michael out.

He takes his hand hesitantly, his hand thick and rough with dust and dirt feeling weird against Luke’s freshly cleaned hand, but Luke just helps pull him out of the jeep and then he’s closing the door with a loud thud. “Alright, so, first of all, and most importantly,” he says, and lets go of Michael’s hand to get something from his white backpack. It’s new, and Michael thinks the decision to go for white is just reaching. It’ll be dirty in .2 seconds. Still he takes a pack of something from the closest zipper. It’s a pack of gummy worms, Michael realizes when Luke puts it in his hands.

Michael smiles quietly, shifting his weight to the other foot. “Luke,” he says, because he doesn’t trust himself to say anything else.

Hopefully, Luke doesn’t dwell on that. “I also got you some new clothes, figured you’d want to get clean. The bathroom doesn’t offer much, just a sink and lots of space to make a mess, but you know, in case you do want to at least change clothes,” he starts, and then reaches for something else in his white backpack. It’s a pile of clothes, and a pair of Converses on top.

“Where did you get this?” he raises an eyebrow.

“Oh, there’s a clothes shop across the street,” he answers simply. “Halsey and I went there after we got cleaned. We got a bunch of stuff.”

Michael doesn’t ask whether they got said bunch of stuff legally. He doesn’t need to.

“Alright,” he answers with a half-smile, and takes the pile of clothes and the sneakers. “Thanks. Where’s the bathroom?” 

Adjusting the backpack on his shoulders again, one hand gripping the strap over his shoulder like he’s suddenly a schoolboy, he starts his way, and Michael follows. Michael’s head is still a little dizzy, his limbs a little numb, like he was so tense in the past few hours that he’s forgotten how to walk normally, how to put a foot in front of the other. But he’s a fast learner, and he’ll gladly kick away any thoughts that bring discomfort.

That’s probably why he ends up saying: “Geordie told me she’s human.”

Luke nods, still walking forward. “Yep. Daryl’s been working with her for a while, though.”

They’re circling the gas station, and judging from the look Luke gives the people in the convenience store, he’d say they aren’t aware their outside bathroom is being used. Michael just suppresses a little smile and keeps walking by his side. “How long? She looks pretty young.”

“She’s a little younger than Halsey. I think she’s nineteen,” Luke answers, and then, once they’re on the side of the gas station, with one door in the far distance and no prying eyes, he touches the small of Michael’s back tentatively, biting back a smile when Michael gives him a look.

Shaking his head and biting a smile of his own, Michael just lets him guide the way. “So how long has she been getting paychecks from Daryl?”

“Like four years? Maybe five, I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Pays in cash though, obviously.”

Obviously.

Michael considers pointing out the brutality in what he’s saying, that a child as young as fourteen could be fighting someone already, collecting guns instead of dolls, but Luke’s just making small talk, and Michael doesn’t want that smile to wash away from his lips. Only if he’s the one washing it away, with his lips and not his words. That’s the only acceptable way.

They stop in front of the door eventually, and Michael shifts his weight to the other foot again, unsure on where to go next. Sure he knows where to go, but with Luke, he doesn’t. Ever. And it makes him a little nervous, a little excited. He thinks Luke feels it too, the hesitance on his fidgeting hands and the eagerness in his eyes, because Luke keeps giving him that look as he sucks on the piercing on his bottom lip.

Luke points at his eyebrow. “How’s the piercing?”

“Doesn’t hurt much,” Michael shrugs, memory going behind his eyelids of Luke on top of him piercing him as Michael’s hands gripped on his waist. It makes him lick his lips and look away, a little flustered. “To be honest, my shoulders hurt more from how tense I was during that fight than my eyebrow could possibly hurt,” he rolls his eyes, snorts. 

“Good, good,” Luke tells him, looking down, too, tone reticent and a smirk that keeps coming and going. Michael looks at him and sort of wants to laugh at the ridiculousness of this, standing outside the bathroom of a gas station in the middle of nowhere, on the way back to the city. “I mean, just good that… like, you’re not in pain because of the piercing. It sucks that your shoulders hurt.”

Michael raises his eyebrows quietly, looking at him. 

Luke eventually takes the lead, and looks back.

Michael’s holding his breath before Luke even looks at him. And he sort of never wants to laugh again, because nothing about this is funny, and still his heart keeps hammering, it never stops at all, it’s just different reasons. Not fear anymore, not regret, not guilt. Just that something, and it makes him stop breathing. 

Then Luke presses his lips together, parts them unsurely, and Michael rolls his eyes with the hesitance that never ends, and kills the distance between them, pressing his lips to Luke’s. 

Luke actually has the indecency to laugh against his lips, and Michael’s a fool enough to mirror the laugh, teeth hitting teeth at first and then Michael’s frowning, offended, holding Luke’s hands and chuckling as he presses his closed lips to Luke’s bottom lip, then the corner of his mouth, then the other side. When he pulls away, Luke’s still got his arms frozen by his sides, eyes closed, lips parted. Michael can’t help but peck his lips once more.

“That was nice,” Luke says, quietly, opening his eyes a second too late.

Michael rolls his eyes, taking a step back, fidgeting at his shirt. “You staying here?”

He’s chewing on his bottom lip, watching Luke part his lips and blink a couple of times. He tries, “Outside?” gesturing widely at where he’s standing, and when Michael nods, he looks like he’s suddenly holding his breath. He breathes out in a little snort, saying: “Michael, I don’t-- I trust you. I won’t keep guard or anything,” he frowns.

Again, he feels like he should roll his eyes. But instead he just shakes his head, saying, “No, no, no,” and when Luke shifts his weight to the other foot, visibly unsure. “I wasn’t asking you if you were going to stay. I was asking you to stay,” he says, reticent, shrugging, and when Luke raises his confused baby blue eyes to him, it’s Michael’s turn to bite on his lip in uncertainty. “I mean, wait for me a bit? I just want to get cleaned up and change my clothes,” he trails off, looking away.

“Oh, you _want me_ to wait,” Luke says, and then he’s giving Michael an enthusiastic smile that makes Michael chuckle, nodding quietly, because the boy is just… Michael shifts his weight to the other foot so he stops himself from reaching for him and kissing him again. Unaware to that, Luke just nods and rests his back against the wall. “No prob. Take your time.”

Michael can’t help rolling his eyes with the fond smile, the pile of clothes and the sneakers on his hands, and then he’s leaving Luke behind and walking in the gas station bathroom.

The bathroom is as all gas stations bathrooms are. Spacious and filthy-looking, with a broken mirror and a window too high and perpetually open. Michael raises his eyebrows at the dark walls and the overall feel of cell the space has. It’s nothing like the cell that was his home for six months, but it still sends a shiver down his spine, taking one hard good look at the place. He decides against dwelling on it, preferring to just set the clothes on top of the closed toilet and stare at himself in the mirror. He chooses to look right past the dirt and the dry blood, and stare at his eyes instead. It’s just green looking back at him, but he can see what’s past the color.

It doesn’t make him hate the mirror anymore. Not the way he used to.

He takes a deep breath and gets rid of all every piece of clothing, does the best he can to wash himself with the water from the sink and the scarce soap, dry his skin with the paper towels, admittedly making less of a mess than the other three had done before. The floor is all slippery with water, he realizes, when he ties his shoes, a pair of beige Converse All Stars that match the brown Harley-Davidson sleeveless shirt that Luke’s gotten him. The black skinny jeans fit oddly perfectly, too, and he likes what he sees in the broken mirror when he stands up. 

It’s the oddest thing, actually liking the reflection, when his arms have been licked off the blood and the dirt, his ripped pants discarded. It makes a dumb sense of pride grow in his chest as he splashes water on his face once more, combs his galaxy hair back with his fingers a little messily as he smirks up at what the mirror shows him.

With his hands still wet, he opens the door of the bathroom.

Luke’s outside, humming under his breath to a song Michael’s never heard. It makes him press his lips together to be quieter and get more of this, but Luke spots him and his lips smile immediately. “Ready to go?” he asks.

“Not yet,” Michael says quietly, and Luke raises his eyebrows.

There’s a tiny pause there, until Luke’s smile turns into a smirk, and Michael opens the door of the bathroom wider, and then Luke’s just shaking his head and walking in. Michael feels his heart beat faster, and the pounding in his head has never been quieter, the attacks of his heart against his ribcage completely unrelated to anything that doesn’t spell LukeLukeLuke. If he was ever confronted about it, he’d say it’s not his fault, how he closes the door behind Luke as soon as he’s in the bathroom, how he presses his body against Luke’s as his mouth does the same to his lips, one hand still on the doorknob and the other on his waist. 

Luke doesn’t, however, confront him about it, so he doesn’t have to justify with how the excitement in his throat and as he slides his tongue against Luke’s with Luke’s arms around him, is just a knee-jerk reaction. Luke kisses him back and hums against his mouth as if to keep up with the song from earlier, tilting his head to allow for even more access as his fingers trace up Michael’s back over the new shirt, and with their chests glued together like this, Michael would say Luke isn’t breathing anymore than he is.

He pulls back, just a tiny little bit, and with his forehead against Luke’s, he tries to steady his breath, the hand sliding away from the doorknob and to Luke’s face, eyelids heavy but resisting the urge to close his eyes, fingers wet and probably cold against Luke’s warm skin without a single complaint. From staring at Luke’s lips, he catches the half-smile, the almost embarrassed way that the corner of his mouth moves up, and then how his hands slide down back to his waist, keeping him close but not any more than he already was. It’s sort of frustrating, in a way that still makes him feel air-headed.

“We’re alive,” Michael says, lips brushing against Luke’s, in what isn’t quite a kiss as much as it’s a whispered confession, something he can’t believe, and yet. 

And yet they must really be alive, if Luke’s soft sigh makes another shiver run up his spine, and this one doesn’t remind him of nightmares, but of weight being lifted off his shoulders. He bites back a smile of excitement and bliss, and Luke nods, pecking his lips quickly, as if he’s stealing that kiss and never giving it back.

“Told ya,” he shrugs, smugly.

Michael stares at him, and then he’s laughing, shaking his head, putting just enough distance between them so he can slap at Luke’s shoulder. Luke whines but still keeps Michael’s waist pressed to his with his hands firmly there. Michael rolls his eyes. “Told me, yeah, says the asshole who went around saying his goodbyes,” and, for good measure, he flips him off.

Luke isn’t offended. He just laughs along and, before Michael can retrieve his hand, Luke steals a kiss at that, too, lips pressing to the back of his raised hand before he can let his hand rest on Luke’s arm. “I mean,” he shrugs, unapologetically, “I have no idea why I’m alive. I was supposed to have died in like six different ways already,” he snorts. Michael’s smile falters, the talk suddenly going somewhere he isn’t ready to go yet, but Luke doesn’t seem to notice. “I got you to them. I don’t know why the fuck Halsey and Geordie are… why they didn’t do it, you know?” he frowns, and Michael’s hands grab at Luke’s arms maybe a bit too tightly, trying to get him to stop without having the strength to interrupt him, but if Luke gets the message, he chooses to ignore it. “Then the Vultures came, and I was sure I was going to die, then. But then you saved me.”

“You make it sound like something bad,” Michael trails off, snorting, looking away.

“It’s just,” he frowns, taking a deep breath, and it takes Michael everything to keep his eyes away, but he won’t look back until Luke says something that feels like fixing the tone he’s just used. When he explains, though, Michael’s pretty sure he’d preferred him not to have. “I’m glad you did it. But I don’t understand why.”

His shoulders drop, and he parts his lips, but his mouth isn’t fast enough to keep up with his brain.

His thoughts race but his tongue slows. He stutters, tries speaking twice before his voice starts working properly. “What type of fucked up thing to say,” he says, and then licks his lips, teeth catching at his bottom lip before he lets go, searching his eyes, but Luke seems to resist eye-contact, even being so close. “Why would I _not_ find a way to save you?”

“Well,” Luke starts, and Michael feels the way his hands grab at him closer, keep him in place like if he wanted to run, he still couldn’t. It blows his mind that they’re even having this conversation, but Luke’s reticent tone keeps making the silence expand in this gas station bathroom, and there are still hours and hours of night ahead, but Michael isn’t ready to waste them waiting, so he squeezes Luke’s arms, urgently. Luke meets his eyes with a quiet shrug, something weird taking the sparkle away from his eyes. “I just figured… you were spending the time a bit, or something,” he frowns, looks away, like he can’t say that and look Michael in the eye at the same time, but yet his hands keep holding him in place. “It’s stupid anyway, I’m not complaining.”

Michael’s eyes widen and his lips part.

His palm goes to Luke’s chest, and Luke lets him go, looking down at the floor embarrassedly. Without Luke’s arms around him, he feels the night cold that comes from the window up to their right, but nothing feels that quite right, and he needs to yell, but he doesn’t.

Michael refuses the pulls to Chaos and searches for Order instead.

“Luke,” he starts, jaw set and and breath held, “Luke,” he repeats, shaking his head, like he’s decided to start this over. He reaches for Luke’s hand, and Luke lets Michael hold his hand, staring at their fingers going together like it’s something he’s never seen before. “I care about you. Okay?” he tries. Luke half-smiles, and it looks so uncertain that it makes it hard for Michael to stay calm. He really, really wants to start yelling. “I do. I care about you.”

“It’s okay,” Luke says, almost immediately.

The same he’d said Michael didn’t have to kiss his chest and stomach in every spot he was cut open by people who didn’t care. And that tone of voice of unworthiness is something that makes the Chaos in Michael’s blood vibrate along his blood stream. He absolutely cannot bring himself to control the Chaos anymore.

He takes a deep breath, and when he breathes out it’s a heavy sigh, and then his voice is impatient, saying: “Luke, I sucked you off _yesterday_ ,” he states, matter-of-factly. Luke parts his lips and blinks at him, a little shocked by how it’s being brought up, and Michael goes on. “Listen, it’s not even about that, okay? I mean, sure, you did talk about how I was your first everything, and I didn’t say anything about how you were my first too. For what matters, anyway. But it’s just because I don’t say these things, and that’s not really how I operate. I don’t _know_ how to make it all seem so smooth and natural like you do. I want to say something and I choke on the words, and something else comes out of my mouth. I’m not used to being looked at this way, and to feeling like I deserve it. But you know what, with you?” he raises his voice more, pointing at Luke. “I feel like I do. I feel like I really fucking do deserve something good. And you are something good. Shit, you’re great, and I do care about you, so if you could please stop listening to your worst thoughts and start listening to me, I’d really fucking appreciate that!”

Michael stops, a little breathless, sunk heart and red cheeks.

Luke gives him a look, the type that says more than words do.

And again, Luke wins at this game of saying things, even with his lips closed. Except it isn’t a game if both win, and his lips aren’t closed for long, because as soon as their eyes connect and their nervous hearts slow down for a tiny second, they’re finding each other again, hands exploring backs and bringing hips together, mouth against mouth and erratic breath quickly becoming the softest of moans.

For a second time, Michael tells him: “You’re beautiful,” but this time it’s against his mouth, desperate and vibrant instead of quiet and calm, and because they’re alive and that’s something only the living can do, he smiles. Luke smiles back, until he’s kissing that smile away from Michael’s lips, and taking his mind off anything that doesn’t taste to Luke’s skin.

* * *

When they get back to the jeep, Geordie’s still in the driver’s seat, and Halsey has her feet on her lap, with her back against the door, laughing at something Geordie said. The second they’re close enough for Halsey to see them, though, her expression shifts into something more serious, and she clears her throat.

“Took you forever,” she says.

Luke rolls his eyes, so Michael figures he shouldn’t be bothered with replying.

Geordie slaps Halsey’s feet away, and before both Luke and Michael are in the car, she’s already turning the key in the ignition. Michael’s a bit light-headed and sleepy, grunts when Luke smiles at him but still doesn’t offer him any warmth in the form of his arms or the blanket.

“Why did you take so long anyway?” Halsey insists, looking over her shoulder.

Geordie snorts, shaking her head, but Halsey seems oblivious to that. Instead she buries her foot in the accelerator, and it’s too much at first, makes Michael frown and look away from the windshield mirror. His head is elsewhere, but Luke’s staring at Halsey with a little smirk, and he should be paying attention, this concerns him, too, but he’s suddenly thinking about getting to the capital, how things are going to be like once he walks those streets, drives past those buildings.

“The floor was slippery, got water on my knees, wanted to dry it a bit before I came back,” he says, raising his eyebrows high. And Michael catches it in time to chuckle, his whole face flustered at how easily he says it, but if things are going to be rough in the next few hours, then at least he’ll have this. Mindless teenage fun. 

“Why would,” she starts, and then stops herself, abruptly.

She parts her lips, looks at Luke and then at Michael. 

Then she rolls her eyes and turns away from them, facing forward. Luke laughs, actually laughs, bright and beautiful, and Michael just wants to laugh to accompany him on that, still smiling at Luke when Luke snorts at Halsey’s unimpressed response.

“C’mon, Halz,” he says, and touches her shoulder. 

She hisses like an offended cat. But then she’s smiling.

Michael rolls his eyes and leans against Luke, because it feels like only rational.

Still with his eyes on Halsey with an amused little smile, Luke wraps his arm around Michael’s shoulders, leaning back until he’s resting against the seat and Michael’s got his head on Luke’s shoulder, hand venturing down his stomach over T-shirt, touching lightly as Luke chuckles once more when Halsey flips him off with a smile, and then she’s talking to Geordie and Luke’s touching Michael’s hand with his.

“When you said vultures the first time, I thought you meant birds.”

The comment surprises both of them, but it’s Luke who snorts a little, “What?!” and gives Michael the weirdest of looks that demands to be looked back, until Michael raises his head to look back at him.

With an unapologetic shrug, Michael sighs, looking at him. “Birds. Like, actual birds.”

Luke raises his eyebrows, a slow smile spreading over his lips. 

Without warning, Luke presses a quick kiss to the tip of Michael’s nose.

Michael looks at him through narrowed eyes, like a suspicious cat who won’t buy the sweet smile and random kisses. But his bravado falls down when Luke tilts his head to the side, holding him close and smiling quietly. Michael sighs softly and presses his lips together, catching his bottom lip between his teeth. 

Before he can say anything, though, Geordie says: “Called Dylan while you guys were out, and he knows we’re coming. We’re not that far, to be honest. Just another hour or so, and we’re back in the city. We need a plan, and then a back-up plan.”

Halsey hums approvingly like she’s just been told that she gets a second serving of dessert. 

Luke nods, too, attention not solely on Michael anymore, even if his arm is still draped around him. “I already have a plan. And a back-up plan. I thought of everything.” 

Michael raises his eyebrows at him.

But at the same time: of course he has.


	11. let's embrace the point of no return

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA i'm so pleased with the chapter!!!!! and i'm so happy with the story in general. so so so so grateful for all the support. you guys are true rock stars. thank you so, so much for the comments. you make me glow. ♥

The city lights are both appalling and appealing.

Michael remembers the first time he spent Christmas in the city, right after Karen and him ran away from the village. He’d been so impressed with the lights; they were everywhere and they were so beautiful. He remembers thinking he could have died right then and there, and he’d have been died happy. He remembers thinking he’d never see a more beautiful show of neon.

Then he saw the way Luke played absentmindedly with his lip ring shaped into an arrow in the dark of motel rooms, and the city lights were just nostalgia, along with the weight of Karen’s arm around his shoulders and her whisper in his ear that he could ask for Santa anything at all.

And they’re appalling, also, because he’s not that young anymore. He knows there’s no magic or magick in those lights at all. There’s just electricity and blinking traffic lights, shields of dim yellow and bright white coming from lamps and posts and the sinking feeling that he’s coming back to where he’s unwanted but not unknown. It makes him a little sick, but like a car crash, he can’t take his palms off the window, can’t look away.

"I bet Dennis is leading everyone while we’re gone," Halsey tells Geordie with a smirk. 

They have been talking for a while, about people Michael doesn’t know, doesn’t care about, wouldn’t bring himself to if he had enough time and energy. Luke probably knows who they’re talking about, though, but he doesn’t participate in any of the conversation. He’s quiet, like Michael, but not as frozen by the city lights as they stop at a red one. He’s got his hand caressing Michael’s thigh like his heart’s not in it, his knee, then out of nowhere his shoulder. It’s like he’s got his mind trained on action and the unnerving peace that comes before the storm makes him restless, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. 

Michael’s not complaining about how Luke’s restless hands are on him.

Geordie snorts, eyes on the windshield, shoulders going up. "You put too much faith on the boy. He’s a child," she says, but she doesn’t seem to mean it in a bad way, not based on the way Halsey rolls her eyes and punches Geordie’s shoulder lightly. "Ouch," she frowns, sounding fake-offended and chuckling lowly.

"He’s a warrior in the making!" Halsey argues, smiling widely.

Michael looks at her, at Halsey, trying to read something that maybe isn’t even there to read. Halsey doesn’t seem to notice him, or the hesitance that makes Michael bite his lip and keep his eyes on her just so he’ll stop looking at the window. They’re so close already, it rattles his bones.

"How long?" he finds himself asking. 

"Not long," Luke answers. 

He's been quiet for long enough that when he speaks, Michael blinks slowly, looking at him, as if he'd forgotten what his voice sounded like. Halsey says nothing, but Geordie agrees, nodding, and with her eyes still on the road, she adds: "Ten minutes or so before we're parking by the side of the Prison. On the one hand, they're not expecting us. On the other hand, they're not expecting us."

Halsey snorts and looks out the window. 

Luke hums in agreement and settled his arm around Michael's shoulder as if he's decided he'll stop moving now. Michael turns back to Geordie. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"If they don't know we're coming, they don't know who we are. They don't know you're important enough not to kill. If Luke's plan goes wrong, they'll shoot to kill any and everyone they find."

The simplicity in Geordie's tone makes Michael stop and stare. She's not supposed to say these things with casualness. She's not even supposed to acknowledge danger. When it does, it makes it all the more real. 

"If Luke's plan doesn't work," Luke starts, and when Michael turns to look at him, his eyebrows are raised. "Then there's plan B."

"What's plan B?" he asks, lowly, only meaning for Luke to hear.

Luke gives him a playful smile, tilting his head to the side. "Let's hope we don't have to find out." stop Michael from asking more questions, Luke presses his lips to Michael's. 

At least that's how it feels.

* * *

Plan A is relatively simple. 

"We get in, get out, and try not to be noticed in the process," Luke tells them again, once they’re all out of the jeep. Geordie locks the doors. She has something in her hands. It’s a detonator. "Geordie, you blow up the bomb remotely. Michael, Halsey, and I will be waiting by the doors with the cloaks on. The second the guards leave to check the bomb damage, we get in. Nobody sees us."

"Except for the cameras," Halsey starts, with a smirk. "But that won’t be a problem. It’s Dylan’s shift in the security room, and it’s too late at night for anyone else to be there except for him. He’ll see us coming."

Michael nods, and takes a deep breath. 

Luke turns to Geordie. "You get in as soon as you can. We need you with the guns, to take Halsey out the second we find Ashton. Michael will open a hole in the wall like last time, and for that Halsey needs to be out and by the car, waiting for us. But we need all the manpower we have until Ashton’s out of his cell."

"Got your blow-torch?" Michael asks, turning to him, suddenly.

Smiling with a small nod, Luke pets the weapon lying on the trunk of the jeep. And then he opens the briefcase, and gives one small cloak to each of them. Michael takes his in his hands, a small transparent device, not more than an inch in size, and with a sigh, he slaps it to the back of his neck. He feels its small spider legs piercing his skin, but it’s just a soft sting, and then, gradually one by one, they all start disappearing. To everyone, except for Luke, with his goggles.

Michael hates not seeing anyone. He hates this plan already.

"Let’s go," he hears Luke saying without listening to him, and then he feels Luke’s hand on his, and that’s the only thing that keeps him from sighing in defeat before the plan is in motion. 

He has a revolver in the back of his jeans.

* * *

Michael feels the shiver going up his spine, in the seconds that he waits in the top of the stairs to the front entrance of the building. It feels weird, just standing there, when he walked past those doors countless times. Most of the time, it was just nodding acknowledging to the receptionist, ignoring the people standing guard all around the ample room, going straight to one of the elevators, clicking 10 for the offices. That’s when he had lunch with Karen there. He never thought much about what happened in the other floors. This wasn’t just the Order Prison. This was an Order Building. That’s it. 

He doesn’t remember when he was dragged into the building as a prisoner. 

He figures they didn’t walk through the front door.

It’s the end of the night, not a full hour before the sun comes and with it, the new day. It’s probably around five in the morning, something like that. None of them have a watch, but they still always seem to know what time it is. It’s unnerving. All of it is unnerving. He’s so bothered by invisible Geordie setting up a bomb relatively close to them that post-traumatic stress doesn’t have any time to catch up to him. He’s going to purposefully walk into the building that almost executed him in the course of six months, and he’s not afraid in the way that he should be.

Which doesn’t stop him from being afraid anyway. It’s just a different fear running up his spine.

It helps that he can’t see anyone in the park of stones and statues that’s just in front of the building. There’s the eventual car going past the traffic lights that intersect just before the so-called-park, but mostly it’s just them, and the statues. 

Michael’s studied half of these in school, or maybe all of them, but even the faces and shapes that are familiar are for stories he doesn’t really remember. He spent most of his time either skipping school with Calum, or exchanging notes talking about the teacher’s nose instead of paying attention to class. They always got someone to help them cheat in their tests, anyway, or Calum did and he always helped Michael in the process too.

The thought of Calum makes his mouth bitter.

And then, boom.

It’s the second explosion Michael’s been present to. The first was yesterday, hours away but still feeling like whole weeks, when they were fighting for their right to live -- and escape in one piece -- when the Vultures came to get them in Room 93. Back then, he was so full of adrenaline that he didn’t notice the small things. The immediate flinch, the way it looks like the statues are sucked into the bomb and then outwards like a supernova. It’s beautiful, stone heads flying and stone arms crashing against concrete, the incredible mixture of rising smoke and sparks. 

Michael sort of wants to watch it forever.

If Luke’s right and his Chaos magick can control anything, then the first thing he wants to control is fire. He’s mesmerized, would stand there, agape, watching all the statues crumble down, if it wasn’t for Luke’s hand yanking him closer, the doors opening with the ground floor team with their arms in position, talking in radios about having the terrorist attack in sight.

And then they, the guards, are running towards it, and they, the terrorists, are running into the building. Michael runs so fast his nostrils and eyes burn, and when he stops abruptly, it sort of feels like a movie, because he’s standing alone in a place he’s been before a thousand times, but nothing’s the same and he isn’t really alone.

It’s a new receptionist. She’s tall and lean and has her auburn hair up in a tight bun. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days, the exhaustion taking over panic. Michael wonders if there have been many terrorist attacks lately, or if that’s reserved to Chaos groups wanting to break their pseudo-Order-people out of their Prison before execution due in a few hours.

The receptionist has her eyes out, right through where Michael imagines they all are, following the thick tinted windows, looking at the guards still approaching carefully the sight of the bombing. Luke squeezes Michael’s hand, and he realizes he’s staring, stopped. They keep walking, and Luke seems to have been there. He wonders if they all have, coming and going invisibly to a level where no guards have the technology to see them or cloaks, to the security room where the only person who sees them is.

Michael keeps walking, as quietly as he can, and the receptionist doesn’t pay attention to the sounds that, in Michael’s head, echo. It’s their breathing and their steps against the floor, creaking just slightly, denouncing there’s someone there, that they’re never alone, neither Order nor Chaos. There’s always something or someone, even for those who, like Michael or humans, are still very much in between.

They leave the lobby, start towards a narrow corridor with a few doors, just past the row of four elevators. The doors don’t look made of golden anymore, and nothing is beautiful in this part. There are a few doors with big EMPLOYEES ONLY signs, and then they stop at the last one, and Michael watches the doorknob turn and then squeak open.

Michael’s stopped breathing somewhere along the time they left the lobby.

Michael feels another pair of hands on his arm, opposite to Luke. It makes him shiver and sink his teeth on his bottom lip, suddenly afraid to move, but he tells himself it’s either Halsey or Geordie, and none of them are going to hurt him. No cloaks in floor level. It’s alright.

Luke’s ahead, then Michael, then whoever’s behind him and more. 

In the security room, there are televisions covering all walls, and a young man sitting in front of them, in a reclined chair, with his crossed feet on top of the panel, long hair up in a messy ponytail. Michael can only see the back of his head where he’s standing, but he feels a little uneasy, like he’s supposed to be looking back, noticing their presence. Something.

But all he does is look back at something on his lap, shoulders a little tense, flinching every now and then as he moves his hands on something, with his head down. 

The door clicks softly behind them.

Michael thinks he’s playing on his phone.

Luke’s the first to take the cloak off, letting go of Michael’s hand and detaching the device from the back of his neck without even raising his shoulders with the backwards sting. Michael doesn’t do it at first, staring with wide eyes, but then comes Geordie, and then Halsey, and he isn’t sure whose hands were on his arm before, because suddenly Halsey’s shoving him aside just a little, walking straight to the chair. Luke chuckles lowly and it sounds like relief, then Halsey turns the chair around with one swift motion. The man smirks, and without saying a word, he shoves his phone down the pocket of his jeans, and spreads his arms.

He has a crooked smile and a ring around his eyebrow. 

He was also the one who held Luke back from stopping the guards when they came to arrest Michael, six months ago. Michael recognizes him, even though he’s more tan now, somehow more muscular, bigger. It’s him.

Halsey lets out a little squealing noise when she wraps her arms around him, her face against his chest, his arms holding her close. He closes her eyes and kisses the top of her head, and Michael just shifts his weight to the other foot, cloak still glued to the back of his neck, feeling uncomfortable and awkward in this room. 

Geordie comes next, slaps Dylan’s arm so he pays attention to her, and without letting go of Halsey, with one hand still wrapped around her, he spreads his other arm, gesturing so that she comes over. She bites back a smile, and hugs him, too. 

Michael presses his lips together.

The girls let go of Dylan, and then Luke walks to him hesitantly, stopping a few steps away from him. Michael watches the smile on Luke’s face growing bigger and fonder, and feels a little nag of jealousy in his stomach when Dylan gives him a long, long look. He tells himself it’s stupid, and he’s being absurd, but then Dylan parts his lips, says: "Lukey, c’mere, you big baby."

And he’s laughing, quiet and affectionate, and Michael sort of hates it.

Luke laughs quietly back, takes a deep breath and hugs Dylan. He’s taller than Dylan by a few inches, Dylan probably around Michael’s height, but he drops his face to Dylan’s shoulder, so he looks smaller. Dylan touches the back of his head and closes his eyes, too. Michael sighs heavily and takes the cloak out of his neck. 

He hisses at the pain, but that’s alright, because he does it to be noticed anyway.

Luke raises his face from Dylan’s shoulder but doesn’t break the hug.

Dylan doesn’t let go of Luke, either.

"So who’s this?" he asks, still smiling a bit.

Michael narrows his eyes, quiet. "I'm Michael," he says, as if that's enough. If he's Order working with Chaos, he knows about his two halves. _He knows._

Finally, he lets go of Luke. And the irrationally jealous angry part of him is glad for that, makes his shoulders relax. But then Dylan's walking his way, with that smile that's equal parts goofy and endearing, and Michael isn't endeared. He's backing away in slow steps to every one that Dylan takes his way. But the security room is small, and the only one who seems to understand what's going on is Halsey, who displays the most amused smile on her face that Michael's ever seen her with.

"Heard a lot 'bout you, Mike," Dylan says, and without any warning, wraps his arms around Michael. Michael doesn't hug back, arms frozen by his sides, eyes wide and staring at Luke for help. Luke's head is tilted to the side in confusion. "Why do people call you Ginger, anyway?”

Michael manages to get away from him, frowning and staring. “They don’t.”

Halsey snorts, shakes her head and looks at Geordie. Geordie takes a deep breath, and Luke chuckles lowly, saying, “No, Dyl, that’s not Ginger. Ginger’s in a mission, that’s why he couldn’t come. Sorry, but today’s not the day you meet him.”

Dylan opens and closes his mouth, and then shrugs unapologetically, though he does move away from Michael again. He decides to go over to Halsey, dropping an arm around her as if that puts things in perspective. Michael sighs, feeling awkward and weird. 

“So my question stands,” Dylan starts. “Who’s this?”

“He’s Michael Clifford,” Geordie says, unceremoniously.

Dylan turns to her in a way that Michael can’t see him, but he corrects her: “Michael Gordon.”

With the shadow of laughter still on his lips, Dylan turns to him with raised eyebrows. The way his lips are parted, Michael can see his crooked white teeth. He’s the picture boy for healthy living in the Order. Clean pretty hair, white teeth, a ring around his eyebrow to show the littlest sign of rebellion but the all-white uniform to prove otherwise. He can see how he got the job.

“Karen Gordon and Daryl Clifford’s kid, no shit,” Dylan scoffs, but he sounds more surprised than mocking. “Michael fucking Gordon-Clifford.”

He hears the hyphen in the name and wants to correct him, but instead Michael just stands there, with his arms numb by his sides, the flustering on his cheeks from being hugged by a stranger still very much there. He notices Halsey rolling her eyes under Dylan’s arm, watches Geordie and Luke taking no part in the conversation anymore, their impatient eyes on the countless screens that fill up a wall.

“Everyone thinks you’re dead,” Dylan announces, matter-of-factly. Michael parts his lips with a frown, and Dylan adds. “Long story, I guess. I’d ask what the fuck you’re doing here on a rescue party for Ashton, but I suppose you’d say it’s a long story too.”

Michael lets himself smile, small and unapologetic too. He wants to ask, but Luke and Geordie’s sudden restlessness tell him there isn’t much time.

“Alright,” Dylan lets go of Halsey, walks to the front of the cameras, playfully nudging Geordie on the side to give him more space. She’s a lot smaller than him, but she’d always stricken Michael as the dangerous type. But now she sort of giggles, slapping his shoulder, and Michael wants to ask how the hell he does that. Instead he stays back and watches Dylan take a deep breath, going through the screens until he finds a specific one, high and to the far left. They all look identical to Michael, white corridors with the eventual small group of people standing guard, locked doors that all make something in Michael’s stomach twist. “He’s here,” he taps his index finger to the screen twice, as if to prove a point. “It’s ninth floor, which is both good and bad. It’s good, I guess, because his cell won’t be guarded. This is the death row, after all. But once you’re out of the elevator, you’ll see The Trinity room.”

This doesn’t seem to be news to any of them, that they’d go past the prophet’s cell, because they all just nod in agreement. Michael clears his throat, frowning, but Geordie gives him an impatient nod, saying: “The Trinity guards the death row, or the guards who guard The Trinity do, anyway.”

Her tone is snappy, like Michael shouldn’t be throwing anyone’s ways any confused looks, but it’s still some sort of explanation, that Michael’s glad for. He bites back a smile of nervousness, and nods his head.

“I suggest starting there first. Knock down those guards, find Ashton, and leave as soon as you can, before they realize there’s something wrong.”

There’s silence, then. To Michael, it sounds like a perfectly doable plan, no holes in it so far. But Luke narrows his eyes and parts his lips, and he looks a little heartbroken. Halsey sighs and flinches away from him, and Geordie just holds his eyes like she means to say something but isn’t sure where to start. Michael opens and closes his mouth twice, because it’s starting to feel too weird and he doesn’t know how to make himself useful.

Then Luke says, matter-of-factly: “You’re not coming.”

Dylan’s smile comes back, lazy and weird, feeling like a weird version of what it was before. “I can’t, Lukey. You know I can’t. I just framed a guy for my spying. Things are good with Eki. Nobody suspects anyone anymore. They won’t know.”

Michael frowns. “Eki? Eki Brown?”

Dylan nods, apparently grateful to have the focus of the conversation be something else. Michael’s parting his lips again, ready to ask what exactly he means by that, and if he’s in contact with the Browns then maybe he knows something about Karen, when Luke’s voice comes again, harder than he thinks he’s ever heard him speak.

“Ashton won’t come if he knows you’re staying.”

Dylan gives him a simple smile. It looks sad. “Then lie.”

He’s just now learning to identify all the different smiles of someone who looks like he’ll always be smiling, when a thousand other things occur to him. He wants to know how close are he and this Ashton person who got himself arrested for seeing too much and not making the cut into the big leagues. He wants to ask about Eki Brown, the girl he went to school with but always wrinkled her nose at Calum and him. He wants to know if he knows anything at all about the Hoods, too, if anything for morbid curiosity. He wants to ask about Dylan’s magick and if he always hugs people when he first meets them.

He wants to ask him if he’s killed before. If he felt guilty or if he was just glad he was alive to feel guilt for anything.

And then he realizes, with a little frustration, that he’ll be left behind, and maybe he won’t make it to their next conversation. It makes him feel weird, a little uncomfortable in his own skin, like no amount of fidgeting with the hem of his shirt will make him stand upright enough, looking at the right place, making himself useful. He can only imagine what it feels like for the other three, and if he’s honest, he doesn’t want to think about it. 

Luke takes a deep breath, breaking the silence. “You can’t do this to him. You can’t do this to yourself, either. Everybody knows how close you were. If he disappears suddenly, they’ll start suspecting you again. They’re going to end up killing you, Dylan.”

Dylan only shrugs, a half-smile that spells both recklessness and selflessness, somehow at the same time. “Eki won’t let them. Don’t worry about it. Worry about getting Ashton out of here safely.”

Then comes the bullets, and for a solid ten seconds or so, Michael’s terrified and paralyzed, but then he realizes they haven’t been found out, or not yet anyway, that it’s Geordie pointing a gun at the central system, a small box to the side, bullets going through the metal box like it’s thin paper, then right in the thick wires. One by one, the small screens start going all-black. 

They all watch it in silence, even Dylan. He doesn’t seem to miss them.

“You know what comes next,” Halsey tells him. She sounds frustrated, sorry, a little angry.

Dylan nods, and Michael sees what his apologetic smile looks like. 

Halsey kisses her four knuckles. Luke and Geordie are both looking away, but Dylan’s still looking at her, so Michael looks too, a little hypnotized by the way she pauses. She murmurs something, something only Dylan can hear, and then punches him right on the chin.

Dylan nearly loses balance with the blow, and before he can regain it, she punches him again, this time in the stomach. He coughs and bends over, falling to the ground with a thud. His eyes are screwed shut and Michael’s still frozen, with his eyes staring wide and his mouth open in horror. He’d very much like to ask and scream at her to stop, but he knows she wouldn’t, and he doesn’t know if he should.

She kicks him in the stomach, again and again and again, and when she’s sweating and breathing hard, and Dylan’s bracing himself on the floor, she kicks his face. 

He jerks his head back to the side, and in the dim light of the security room, Michael can see his face covered in blood, nose perhaps broken, mouth showered in blood that drips to the floor. His eyebrow has split where the ring pierces it. It’s horrifying, so much worse than the actually dead people he’s seen before, because this is someone he talked to, smiled at, if anything a little bit. Someone who’s hugged him. And now is unconscious on the floor, bleeding away.

He turns to Halsey, and his fingers are shaking.

She gives him one look of spite, and then turns to Luke.

“He said ninth floor,” she tells him, spites the words out, and just like that, they’re leaving.

* * *

The way up is odd.

They take the stairs, can’t risk someone finding out about them and cutting the power, trapping them in the elevator. But it’s a long way to go, and he’s breathless after the third row of stairs, and he wouldn’t feel comfortable complaining, because he’s still thinking about Dylan lying on the floor, unconscious, so he just keeps going.

Nobody speaks.

That’s maybe the oddest part, Michael thinks, that they’re all so quiet. Left to his own devices, Michael doesn’t think he does a very good job. Every door they ignore that lead them back into the corridors is another door that Michael’s left thinking about. He pictures endless rows of prisoners, all unfairly put there, all being tortured like he was, or neglected like he was, forced into a dreamy state of despair and still painfully awake, for weeks, for months, maybe for years.

He pictures the death row corridor just like that, but with an electric chair in the end. 

Michael can’t stop thinking about Karen, and whether she’s in one of those cells. He should’ve asked Dylan, should’ve insisted on knowing what he meant when he said people think Michael’s dead. He needs to know if Karen’s mourning or if she’s the one who convinced people of that, so they stop looking for her child. So he can live. So he can find her, eventually.

The anxiety only grows worse as they approach ninth floor. By the time they reach it, Michael’s the only one who’s really breathless, but Geordie’s cheeks are tainted pink. Halsey and Luke look abnormally comfortable, and Michael wants to crack a dumb joke about how it’s required Chaos training that you must marathons, or something. He’s nervous enough that he might say it anyway, but then Geordie clears her throat, bringing all attention to her, and when he looks at her draw the gun, all humor is gone.

“After this door,” she raises her elbow in the direction of the heavy metal door, meant to protect against fire. Michael’s mind wanders, thinking whether anyone ever attempted to set fire to the whole floor, to the whole building, burn them all away. “Will be the guards. They’ll be guarding The Trinity, and probably have no clue that we’re here, so that’s good. We need to take them out fast. After, I leave with Halsey, to make sure she’s by the jeep to help you guys out when you leave.”

“I can’t take three at a time,” Halsey says, slowly, raising her eyebrows at Luke, and fully pretending like Michael isn’t part of this -- the conversation, the plan, isn’t even there. “Two is already a lot.”

“Noted,” Luke nods.

Michael presses his lips together, trying to stop himself from asking, but can’t hold it anyway. In the dark of the stairs they probably don’t see the way he hesitates, or notice the way he fidgets at the hem of his shirt, unsure of himself, of this plan, of everything. He agrees that maybe he isn’t even there. Still back at Room 93, figuring out what to do next, without having to choose sides and directions before he’s ready to do so. Not leaving started out as a short-term situation so Luke wouldn’t be killed. Then he just couldn’t leave him, period. And now he’s about to help break someone else out of the place that kept him prisoner for half a year.

“What are we going to do while you two leave?” he asks, looking at Geordie and not at Halsey, as some childish passive-aggressive revenge, resolution to ignore her right back.

Luke touches his arm, gives him a look that Michael can’t read. “Best case scenario, we get Ashton out without a problem. But it’s still too much to just leave with him. We need to make a bit of a mess, you know? Just kill another guard or so, so they don’t know it’s Ashton we came for. His Mum and sister are still in the city, and they have everything to lose.”

Michael blinks up at him, careful and confused.

So they have to kill more innocent people, so Ashton’s family lives.

None of it makes sense, and it’s all too brutal, the image of Halsey kicking Dylan’s face on the floor still too vivid for him, crawling under his skin time and time again, just when he thinks he’s about to forget about it. But he nods, because even though it doesn’t make any sense, it still does. It’s logical even if it’s bad.

“Okay.” Michael says.

Nobody’s waiting for his okay. Nobody needs it.

But still, when he says it, Luke turns to him with the smallest of smiles, just the corner of his mouth going up without it really looking much like a smile, and with one hand holding his blow-torch, he wraps his arms around Michael, kisses the top of his head. It makes Michael’s heart sink, and he hugs him back, closes his eyes when he inhales his scent. He smells to post-bomb smoke and terrorist thrill, but it’s still the kindest scent he can associate with anyone. He raises his head and presses his lips to Luke, with his eyes open and his heart on his sleeve. He hopes Luke sees it, both his eyes and his heart, but Luke’s eyes are closed and he’s sighing, brushing his lips softly over Michael’s for a second before pulling away.

Halsey has her hand on Geordie’s arm, and none of them were paying attention. Geordie makes a face, wrinkles her nose, and all Michael catches is that she tells Halsey: “I don’t like plan B.”

Michael has a feeling he isn’t going to, either. Especially with how prepared everyone seems to be for it, except for him. But as he watches Luke take the front, walk around them so he’s the first out the door, Michael also trusts him.

Which is maybe dumb, he thinks, trusting a Chaos witch with a shitty power, goggles on top of his head with no one wearing the cloak, a blow-torch aimed forward, and a slight frown on his face. 

Maybe it’s impossibly dumb to trust him.

But he does. He _really_ does.

When Luke kicks the door open, Michael reaches for his gun. 

Then it’s just too fast and too slow at the same time.

The only guards of the floor are gathered around what looks like a glass room, only the walls are thicker and you can’t see what’s inside. They’re all talking distractedly, their guns down, and Luke runs towards one of them fast, and the only thing that reaches the guard faster than Luke with the blow-torch is Geordie with her gun. She shoots the man on the leg, and Luke moves forward, focused and quiet. Michael raises his gun but doesn’t come any closer, doesn’t know where to point to, or what he’s supposed to do exactly.

His breathing rhythm speeds up.

The first thing he notices, really, is how odd the room they’re guarding looks. It looks like the heaviest thing in the world, a cell made of concrete or iron just randomly put in the beginning of a corridor, that’s wider at first but narrows where the cells to the death row begin. There’s no electric chair in the end of the corridor, almost disappointingly so.

Halsey’s eyes are turned white and she strums invisible strings in the air as one man loses hold of his gun. Luke’s busy with the next one, so to back Halsey up, Michael shoots.

He shoots at the man’s chest.

He didn’t mean to. He wanted to shoot at his arm.

His lips tremble and he turns around, with his eyes wide and his hands shaky. He didn’t mean to, but now the man’s going down. He didn’t mean to, and nobody knows, because they’re all busy with the ones still standing. They’re taking care of that and of each other and Michael’s staring back at the man on the floor with the growing red wetness on his chest. He wears an all-white uniform like everyone else, and doesn’t have a helmet. His nose is a little crooked and long, he has thin blond eyebrows and his mouth looks like it could shape into a nice smile. 

Michael approaches slowly.

His hand is on the floor, fingers still loosely around the gun. He doesn’t look like he’s breathing anymore, but that has most likely to do with Halsey. Michael tilts his head to the side, looking down. There’s a wedding ring around his finger. 

He shuts his eyes, and imagines him out of there.

His heart is oddly calm, but he feels like crying.

It all happens and he doesn’t take part in anything anymore.

He’s inside his own head, and then everyone’s down, and all his allies are standing tall and dignified, ready to move on, ready to break their friend out of this nightmare, and Michael really wants to ask them if any of them get visits sometimes at night from all the people they’ve killed, but when he searches their faces, he sees no time for dialogue or for thinking of the night.

All he sees is a variation of rush and high. 

Michael tries swallowing back these weird feelings, meeting Luke’s eyes because that feels like the best he can do at the moment. Luke parts his lips, touches his shoulder with a little squeeze. He’s sweating already, hair a bit overgrown gluing to his forehead. Michael wants to kiss him just to make sure he’s still alive and didn’t die with the man he shot on the chest. But then Luke looks over him, the frown growing deeper, and he mouths: “No, no, no.”

Three times.

One for each of the people in this floor he feels responsible for, excluding the one they’re there for.

“There’s more,” Luke yells, and Michael looks over his shoulder.

There’s what looks like an army coming. They’re coming from the end of the corridor, they’re armed to their teeth, and these ones wear helmets. Michael only assumes that means they’re better prepared to fight back. They won’t be shot on the chest and fall down lifeless with their crooked nose and their wedding ring. 

Michael presses his lips together, turning his face away from the men and to Halsey and Geordie.

Geordie yells: “Time for plan B,” raises her gun, and starts shooting.

Halsey reaches for Michael, and for a second, he thinks she’s going to hug him. Then he sees she’s just taking his gun from him. Even though she doesn’t like guns, she uses it, too, one hand with her fingers on the trigger, the other gesturing up, so the bullets ricochet with air so thick it’s a bubble around them. It must take a lot, because in the tiny milliseconds Michael watches that, he notices the skin tear between her fingers, the first few droplets of blood forming where there should be smooth skin.

He doesn’t watch any more of it.

He’s got Luke’s hand on his shoulder, guiding him away.

“What are you doing?” he frowns.

Luke takes a deep breath, avoids his eyes, and with his blow-torch, he just focuses on the lock of the room. It clicks open, the room where The Trinity is, and Michael’s heart is going so fast he thinks he might choke on it. He insists, holds Luke’s hands to stop him. The sound of bullets and the eventual muffled scream are their background, but Michael isn’t looking back, not right now.

“ _What are you doing?_ ”

“Keeping you safe,” Luke tells him, apologetically, frowning like this is goodbye all over again, and Michael hates it, wants to punch him just after kissing his knuckles too, but instead he just shakes his head no, vehemently and making his jaw hurt a bit. Luke adds, quick and firm: “I’ll melt the metal with the door and seal you up, okay? I’ll come back for you, I promise. No one’s going to hurt you. They’ll never shoot at the door that keeps The Trinity. They’d never risk hurting her.”

Michael shakes his head again, faster this time too, feeling sanity start to slip away as desperation starts to grow. Geordie shouts, she may be hurt, and when Luke looks over at her with a frown, the fight calling to him, Michael tries to yank his hand back, go and face the fight himself, even if that means a lot more people with red on their chests.

But Luke brings him back, says: “Michael.”

Michael shakes his head, feeling his eyes burn and his vision blur. “Don’t leave me, please.”

“I’m not leaving you. It’s too dangerous for you out here now,” he says, and opens the door. 

Keeping his back to it like if only he refuses to look, there’ll be a different outcome to this, he still shakes his head, murmuring a mantra of, “No,” that keeps on going, yanking his hand back forcefully this time, but only to wrap around Luke’s wrists, try and squeeze some sense into him. “I can fight. I can be helpful. I can.”

“I know,” Luke half-smiles. “But I can’t afford to lose you. None of us can.”

Luke kisses his first four knuckles.

And then he holds the back of Michael’s neck and kisses his mouth.

The shock of it and the tears in his eyes don’t really let it sink in, that Luke’s walking with him to inside the room. Maybe Luke will keep him company while he’s there. Only he doesn’t. His mouth leaves Michael’s and his hands leave him too, and then he’s giving him one apologetic look before he’s sealing the door. Before Michael’s locked up for the second time in this place.

Michael’s breath starts to speed up impossibly so, his eyes wet and his head messy. 

He stares at the closed door, and feels himself start to hyperventilate.

The claustrophobia grows, makes him turn around, but once he does, he’s taken aback by several things. The walls are all covered in mirrors, in a way that makes it so a thousand different Michaels look back at him once he’s facing them. It’s too bright and there’s no chains hanging from the ceiling like in his cell. It’s ampler, too, and instead of having its prisoner held up, the cell has a bench. A small wooden bench with three little girls sitting quietly side by side, their hands folded politely on top of their thighs, blinking in sync as they look at Michael. Their faces are drained from all curiosity or expression. 

He’d imagined them old, but they don’t look older than ten. They all have black very curly hair, dark smooth skin, and plump lips that don’t shape into smiles. They’re all wearing identical all-white Order uniforms that look too big for them, but they don’t seem to mind. They don’t seem to think. They don’t even seem to breathe. If it wasn’t for their blinking, Michael would say they’re wax figures. 

Michael sets his jaw, and walks back until he feels his back against the wall. 

It’s cold.

He realizes it’s just his body that it’s too hot, sweating and nervous.

He licks his lips, staring at The Trinity.

“Fuck me,” he murmurs.


	12. just like a smoking gun, we’re gonna hit and run

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [i drew muke in opia again!](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/130365871420/i-drew-muke-in-opia-again-today) this is a thing that happened. um. don't judge me. and yessssss thank you for your support, guys. comments are much appreciated and so are the messages you leave on tumblr. thank you for all of those. /u rock ♥/

Sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, Michael takes a deep breath, staring dead ahead, past the three little girls, and to the several versions of himself that stare back, under the same bright light. He doesn’t look sweaty anymore, his hair no longer gluing to his forehead. It’s been combed back messily with his fingers, the purple not standing out so much as the dark roots. He bites the insides of his cheeks to pass the time, and regards The Trinity again:

“You’re no fun.”

The Trinity doesn’t look offended. Just blinks and keeps on staring at him.

He sighs and pulls the end of his skinny jeans up a bit, so he can massage his ankle with his thumbs. “It’s been so long already. Do you think they’re all alright?” he asks, but he doesn’t raise his eyes to the three-figures person, or three individual people who work as one, or whatever it is that The Trinity stands for. He only rolls hesitation in his tongue, and then breathes out: “It’s hell in here. You can’t listen to a single thing outside.”

He presses his lips together, and meets The Trinity’s eyes again. The Trinity blinks.

“I don’t know what Luke was thinking about. What _was_ his plan B, anyway? If anything goes wrong, lock Michael up in a sealed cell and go on a kamikaze mission with everyone else?” he snorts, raising his eyebrows. The Trinity doesn’t react to that. “It’s bullshit, man. What if they all die? Will I be locked here forever with the worst company in the world?” he gestures at her, at them, and the three little girls only blink once more, faces blank.

Michael presses his lips in frustration, shakes his head with a heavy sigh.

“But, I mean, that’s not going to happen. I’m sure they’ll come back, all in one piece. Even Geordie, who doesn’t seem to care much about me, and Halsey, who still doesn’t like me. What’s on her mind, by the way? If I was using Luke so I could run, wouldn’t I be gone already? I’m way past the point of no return, and I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do to prove that to her,” he rolls his eyes, drops his head back with a soft thug. “And then there’s everything else. I wish I knew where Mum is, or where we’re going next. Truth is, even if I was to run, I wouldn’t know where to go. It’s shitty, not knowing where you belong anymore. I don’t have a home.”

The Trinity tilts her head to the side very slightly. All three of them, to the right, and Michael looks at her with a frown, but he isn’t sure she moved or it was just him closing his eyes and opening them up and focusing on the ceiling, his peripheral vision all fucked up by exhaustion.

“You know exactly what’s going on with Mum and everyone, don’t you?” he narrows his eyes, looking ahead. The Trinity blinks, and he crawls forward, getting on his knees and then sitting back on his legs. “You saw Luke breaking me out of here. You told someone who told someone else and then Daryl knew and he went after Luke when he was still a kid. When I was still a kid. You knew it years before it happened,” he accuses, his voice getting a little louder but steadier. “Did you know we’d get together, too? We’d kiss and fuck and I’d bite his shoulder so I wouldn’t say anything I can’t take back?” he snorts. He’s not sure why he sounds angry, talking about Luke with three someones who don’t look older than ten. But he does, feels frustrated and weird and sad, all at once. “Did you know what I’d… feel?”

The Trinity stands up.

One of the little girls, the one in the middle, stands up, and Michael sits back until he’s stumbling, falling back a bit awkwardly, frowning and blinking fast. He isn’t expecting a reaction at all, but then she’s looking at him, looking older than anyone Michael’s ever seen, and Michael’s lips quiver.

“What are you,” he starts, but his voice fails.

He clears his throat, trying to make himself sound firm again, but to no success.

The Trinity narrows her dark eyes slightly, and raises one of her hands. Michael stares at her palm, his frown deepening, and then he feels something tug at his insides. He takes a deep breath but all he breathes in is dust. His eyes roll back, but his magick is a mess, starting and ending and swirling inside him before he can call it to his fingertips. He gasps, trying to breathe, but finds that although he feels no air in his lungs, he’s still breathing normally.

His can’t see anything. His eyes rolled back, but what he sees is not the usual.

The Trinity can’t be touching him, but still he feels her touch all around him. He feels her hands on his face and covering his eyes and looking into his soul. And then suddenly, he isn’t there anymore. He’s away, far away in the future, in days or weeks or months or years, and all he feels is the rattling explosion inside him of being taken forward when his body doesn’t belong there yet, but will.

He sees himself but not in front of a mirror. He sees himself like he’s out of his body. He sees a Michael that looks ten years older and at the same time, not a day older. His eyes are green but he looks like he’s got magick vibrating through him all the same. Michael almost feels it, just by looking at him. But his eyes are set on something, looking ahead, narrowed eyes and heavy breathing. Michael takes a few steps back from himself, but he can’t focus on the environment, can’t make his eyes look away. It’s like The Trinity is holding his head in place, fingers keeping his eyelids open in a way that hurts, but still he can’t focus on anything other than what she wants him to see.

And then it changes.

He’s allowed to look at the side, still breathing in dust and watching his other self breath in air like it’s poisonous, and he’s looking at someone else, with his knees on the floor, his face covered in blood that doesn’t look like his. The other person’s bleeding, though, blood covering his lips as he spits down on the ground. He’s got a look on his face like this is the last moment of his life, or the last one that matters anyway. His clothes are ragged and covered in blood. Some of it must be his, some must be not. 

It’s Calum.

Calum’s looking at him, raising his eyebrows as he wrinkles his nose in an expression that spells anger, frustration, something else and different that runs deeper than anything bad that Michael’s ever seen. It’s hatred. 

“If you go through with this,” Calum tells him, “I’ll _never_ forgive you.”

Michael snorts. 

Not him, the other Michael, the Michael from the future who has something in his eyes that isn’t magick but still looks like it without looking like it. The paradox makes his head ache, and his heart breaks a bit at the sound of Calum’s voice, show hurt he looks on the outside, how revolted he looks on the inside. How that’s all directed at Michael. Michael watches himself snort and wants to bite his tongue. He watches himself shakes his head in a small way.

He wonders if he’s the one who caused him to bleed.

“Good,” Michael says, staring into Calum’s eyes like he means for his look to hurt, too. “Then you’ll know what it’s like. I never forgave you, either.”

Michael feels it sting, his own words out of his own mouth, but the words aren’t properly his yet and don’t make sense to his ears. Sure he knows what he’s talking about, couldn’t have forgiven Calum if he tried, for not coming forward and defending him when he was arrested, for never having tipped Michael in on Mali suspecting of him, for never… Choosing him.

Which is unfair. He isn’t sure he would’ve done if the roles were reversed.

But they weren’t, and it’s still him who got burned.

He’s pulled back, before he can register any other facial expressions from himself or Calum. Before he’s allowed any look at the place they’re in or if there’s anyone else with them. He hears something, a third voice, maybe crying, but he doesn’t recognize it. It’s all too fast, and then suddenly, he’s dropping back.

Michael’s body collapses against the wall again, and he opens his eyes, gasping for air, bringing both his hands to his neck. The Trinity is standing in front of him with a blank expression, hand still raised, and he realized he must’ve stood up and walked backwards to avoid her touch, but it was pointless. She never touched him at all. Her hand is still hovering just close to his face, and then she walks back.

She just looks away from him, turns back, and walks to the bench until she’s sitting with the other two. And Michael’s still breathing hard, holding his neck a bit too strongly, chest going up and down with the vivid memory of the hatred in Calum’s eyes, and his own words echoing in his head. It goes in a loop, forever and ever, to never be forgotten.

He sinks down until he’s sitting on the floor once more, staring at The Trinity with his wide eyes.

On one side, he hears the whispers of the man he shot.

On his other, Calum’s voice telling him he’ll never forgive him for something he hasn’t yet done.

“Why did you show me that,” he breathes out, all intonation gone from his voice.

The Trinity only blinks at him, quiet again.

Then the door to his side shakes, until it breaks and is kicked open. 

Michael doesn’t have time to be afraid it’s not Luke.

He’s still thinking about what he saw.

“Sorry we took so long,” Luke says. Michael keeps his eyes forward, frowning, but then the voice really comes to him, and he turns to look at the door. It’s Luke, with a half-smile, and blood all over his shirt. He stares down, and Luke must notice, because he touches his shirt absentmindedly, and says: “Um, that isn’t mine.”

Michael slowly pulls himself up to his feet, taking a deep breath as a final say on his breath that it’s time to steady. “Is everyone alright?”

His voice is fragile, shaken. Luke must overlook it; one glance in The Trinity’s way and he seems to know why, even if he doesn’t ask. He properly steps into the room, one hand still on the door, like he couldn’t break out of it if he wanted to. He holds his hand out for Michael, and when Michael takes it, he feels a little safer, like his hands aren’t shaking anymore, and his chest isn’t so heavy. It is, it is, it is.

Luke doesn’t answer his question, but his face, although covered in sweat and stained with blood, doesn’t look sad. He just looks tired, impatient, still bits of that rush from before present.

Michael goes as Luke takes him, is guided out of the room with his eyes still over his shoulder, one hand in Luke’s as Luke closes the door with a long look. The Trinity looks back at Luke. She says nothing, but she blinks. Luke tells her: “One day, we’ll come back for you, okay?”

It may be reaching, but Michael thinks she gives Luke the smallest of smiles.

Then Luke closes the door behind them, and they’re out.

The corridor looks… it’s terrible. It’s war. It’s bodies on the floor, a mixture of causes of deaths. There’s blood and there’s burned limbs. The strong smell of rotten makes Michael’s stomach turn, and he wrinkles his nose, turning his head away from the massacre ahead of him. It makes something crawl under his skin, the desperation of seeing no blue from Halsey’s hair, no dirty blond from Geordie’s. He doesn’t see them. Anywhere he searches, his eyes going past the countless bodies on the floor, he still doesn’t see them.

But he sees another boy.

Boy wouldn’t cut it, not quite. He’s definitely older than Luke and him by a couple of years, at least twenty-something. He’s shirtless, and from his chin to his chest to his lower stomach, he’s covered in blood. He doesn’t appear to be hurt at all, but it’s like he showered in it. His pants are mostly clean, though. 

There’s a boyish smile on his face that contrasts with all the death around them in a way that makes MIchael want to throw up. He leans against Luke, feeling sick, and Luke just squeezes his hand, saying: “It’s alright. The girls have left already. Geordie needed to get Halsey out fast. But they’re fine.”

Michael closes his eyes for a second, and breathes out in relief.

“You’re Ashton,” he tells him.

The boy/man/something in between gives him a hurried smile. His hands are covered in blood, and when he combs back his long hair, it dirties his hair further with drying slickness of blood. It makes Michael feel a little sicker, but he tries not to show it.

“And you’re the kid everyone’s talking about,” he smirks. “Nice to meet you.”

Luke gives them both approving smiles, like in the midst of all of this, he’s still glad Ashton and Michael are meeting. One of his hands is still wrapped in Michael’s, and Michael reluctantly lets go, looking at him for some direction. Luke looks at him in such fond way that he wants to kiss him, cry with him, tell him all that he’s seen and wishes he hadn’t, and all that he misses but won’t tell himself he does. 

Instead of inviting that possibility, Luke looks away from him. “We need you to get out, Mikey. Think you can call your Chaos magick?”

Michael doesn’t know, but what he says is: “Sure.”

“Alright, so we have to walk for a bit,” Luke points at the far right, just after a corridor, and Michael thinks of where they’d parked the jeep, wonders how come Luke’s got such a strong sense of direction, and he wants to compliment him, the inclination to cry a thousand times harder, but he swallows all of that, and starts leading the way, like he’s got any shot on his own.

Ashton clears his throat. “Dylan first. Is he at the security room?”

Without skipping a heartbeat, Michael tells him: “He’s in the jeep with Geordie and Halsey already. He was waiting for them downstairs to help them out. Let’s go.”

Luke gives him a look.

Michael isn’t sure what that look is supposed to mean, if he’s proud and glad or disgusted. But he still looks surprised, one way or another. They hold eye-contact for a moment, before Ashton nods okay and starts walking, too, avoiding the bodies on the floor, but keeping his gaze up.

That’s when Luke finally looks away, and goes to in front of them, so he can lead the way.

He is the only one who knows the way out of this.

For a while that seems to expand forever, they’re quiet, keeping their eyes forward and following Luke. Then Michael steps on someone’s hand and it makes him queasy, so he clears his throat and says: “You did take a long time. Did something go wrong?”

Ashton sighs heavily. “That was me, sorry to keep you waiting. It’s just that we had something to do, before we left. No guard who saw what I saw could make it out alive,” he says, and his tone is matter-of-factly, like he’s stating that the Earth is round or fire burns. Michael frowns at him, staring, and eventually Ashton looks back at him. “What?”

Michael doesn’t say anything.

Luke does. “Ashton saw something big, apparently,” he says, but his eyes are still forward, unbothered as one can be. “Nobody can know about it, except for him.”

Biting back his first thought -- _what’s so good about him that he gets to live when everyone else dies for having seen something that wasn’t their choice to see?_ \-- he turns away from Luke and again at Ashton. “What did you see?” he asks.

“Not now,” Ashton says.

That’s not good enough for Michael. 

Still, he doesn’t get to insist. Luke’s arm comes to obstruct Michael’s way, and he almost stumbles on a body lying on the floor. He takes his eyes down, disgusted with what he sees. It’s not so much a body as it’s part of one, just a torso with no head or limbs attached, still in all-white uniform turned into all-red. It makes him feel like throwing up all over again, only Luke’s arm keeping him from walking forward brings his eyes up.

It’s the elevator on the other end of the corridor. It’s opening, and there’s a whole team of armed guards inside. The one in the front isn’t wearing a helmet. The one in the first is the one who arrested Michael in front of his school. The one in the front is smirking at them, saying: “What do we have here?”

The one in the front is the one Michael wants to kill.

He breathes in and takes a step backwards, like the thought both suits him and doesn’t.

“Ash,” Luke says, warningly.

There’s a roar. That’s the first thing Michael notices. Then he turns to look at Ashton, and his eyes are white and opaque, but that’s not the only change. His shoulders are rising, and under the blood there’s something coming, black and thick. 

It’s fur.

He roars again, louder this time, his head tilting to the side in an angle that makes it look like his neck is breaking. His shoulders jolt forward and then he’s going forward properly, body dropping. It looks like all the bones in his body break, as he keeps tilting his head to one side and another, roaring louder and louder until the fangs are grown and his all-white eyes are staring forward.

The pair of pants mostly clean are ripped apart, to give place to muscular black legs. 

Michael watches Luke’s friend turn into a fucking black panther.

He blinks away the shock, frowning, and Luke turns his face to Michael, with his eyes still on the team raising their guns to shoot. He says: “I’ll take you to the exact spot. Okay? Then just trust us to handle it, and you work on calling your magick.”

Michael nods, swallowing back the knot in his throat.

Ashton roars again, and with no warning on either side of the fight, he surges forward, springing their way. He jumps at the man in the front’s throat. The man who tortured Michael for months. And as he stands there, breathing heavily, he finds himself hypnotized by the way Ashton sinks his fangs in the man’s jugular and pulls. There’s blood everywhere, showering the place and its walls, its men and its women, and they’re all going to shoot at Ashton to stop him, but he’s fast and Luke’s got his hand up and his eyes black. 

Michael hadn’t noticed.

The spots between Luke’s fingers are bleeding, were already bleeding before, but he keeps going. He focuses and makes it so the man with his gun closest to Ashton obstructs. The man shakes the barrel of the gun, and the bullet comes back, straight into the man’s head.

The distraction makes Ashton jump into another victim, roaring on his way up and then down, animal body heavy and strong, and in a way, beautiful. Black fur showered in blood. Beautiful.

“C’mon,” Luke takes Michael’s hand again. 

Michael doesn’t look away from the man who tortured him. He’s lying on the floor and coughing, still alive but with no chance of making it to the next twenty minutes. He’s dying, just like he’d whispered into Michael’s ear that it was happening to Michael instead. And he wishes he could feel haunted at the sight, could feel anything but relieved. But the truth is, the reason he can’t look away isn’t that he’s horrified.

He’s dignified.

They run closer to the team but not close enough that Michael feels afraid. It’s only when Luke touches the wall in front of him, and it gets dirty with Luke’s blood that Michael does feel afraid. He frowns, and stares at him.

“No time for pep talk,” Michael says, “I do this, or we’re all dead. No pressure,” he adds with a nervous half-smile. 

Luke smiles at him. And like he can’t help himself, he presses his lips to Michael’s hard. It makes his teeth hurt against his mouth, but he still presses even harder, because he feels something burn in his chest and tears come to his eyes. He can do this. He must.

And then Luke lets go of him, taking a gun from the waist of his jeans and shooting. Michael doesn’t look at the outcome of that. He turns around so he’s facing the wall, and tells himself he’s alone, and this isn’t a life or death situation. Tells himself this isn’t the place that’s haunted his dreams for so long. Tells himself this is just another drill, him changing the shape of Luke’s lip ring and the split second he fixed a bird’s broken bones before he ruined everything.

He isn’t going to ruin everything this time.

He knows he won’t, because if he does, he hurts Luke, and he can’t have that.

Closing his eyes, he zones out of Ashton’s roars, the bullets, the screaming. He presses his lips together and zones out of his own head, Calum’s eyes full of hatred and the man with a bullet hole in his chest. 

He calls his magick to him. He calls his Chaos.

Michael feels it start in his heart, the Chaos, until it’s embracing it like new arteries. It starts in the chore of him this time, and not in his fingertips or licking at his ankles. It starts from inside and from his heart, and he feels it licking at his ribs instead, spreading over his chest and up his throat, until he feels cement in his mouth.

He opens his eyes, and feels the cement of the wall in front of him. Feels the molecules vibrating deadly and rolls it from one side of his mouth to the other. He wants to cough but instead he raises his hands. They’re not shaking, but they’re still not only his. He can feel Luke’s blood in his hand where he was held, and it makes him flinch.

It’s no time to hesitate.

He spreads his fingertips until it hurts and then he spreads his palms.

A perfect circle opens in the wall.

He blinks his eyes back, with a pleased smile.

He’s proud. Happy. And someone’s going to shoot at Luke’s head.

His heart beating fast, he blinks and the world is gone again. He doesn’t see the frown in Luke’s face that he saw a second ago, or the man aiming his gun high, Ashton running back but in no way going to be there in time. All he sees is the void, and the only thing that isn’t filled by void is the man and his gun.

He tastes bullets in his tongue. And he’d spit them all out, but instead he gives air one fierce push, and when he blinks back, it’s in time to see air punch the man’s gun back, the bullets exploding against him, making a hole the size of Michael’s fist open in his chest.

Michael doesn’t look back at the man. He looks at Luke.

Luke’s breathless and his face is covered in dirt. He looks at Michael. 

Ashton runs their way fast and then he blinks back, and just like that, he’s turning into a man again. It’s absurd to see the change, makes Michael’s head hurt a bit. The most drastic change he’d ever seen in a shapeshifter was a woman, a friend of Karen’s, who had wings. There was also the juggernaut that almost killed them back at room 93, but he was still processing that.

Naked, Ashton stands in front of them.

Behind him, there’s no one standing. 

“You just had to ruin the last pair of pants you had,” Luke shakes his head, looking at Ashton.

Ashton smirks, and shakes his head, going past Luke. He looks at Michael and then at Luke, and Luke nods, so that must signal something to Ashton. Michael’s still taking long breaths to try and balance himself on the pride and shame of his obedient Chaos, when Ashton takes his hand and starts forward.

“What are you doing?!” Michael asks, yanking his hand back.

“You two have to go first, okay?” Luke says. “In case anything goes wrong… At least you two are out.” 

Ashton gives Michael an apologetic look, and he does seem like he has a lot of arguments coming up. Michael hates them all without even hearing the first. So instead of arguing on that, what he does is to walk closer to the hole he’s made on the wall, check that Halsey is really all the way down -- and she is, a tiny blue dot on top of the trunk of the jeep -- and then he pushes the naked boy out the building.

Luke runs towards him with widened eyes, and slowly that beautiful maniac smile comes to his lips, both surprised and so endeared that Michael can feel it in his own lips as he mirrors it. It makes him breathe more calmly, like he can give it all a rest, as he wraps his arms around Luke, and watches as Halsey slows down his fall.

“We’re leaving together,” Michael tells him, small but decisive, and Luke doesn’t question it.

They watch Ashton finally reach the ground.

Luke looks over his shoulder, to take a look at the ruined floor, at all the murder, all the blood. 

Michael doesn’t.

He offers his hand, and says: “Let’s jump.”

Luke nods, and takes his hand. 

Just like they had once before, they jump.

* * *

When they get to the ground, Ashton’s been knocked unconscious. Luke doesn’t ask about it, but Halsey’s knuckles look sore and she gives him a look over her shoulder as Luke and Michael both get him in the jeep. Luke reaches to get Michael’s blanket to cover him, but Michael scowls at him, so Luke gets some clothes from his beat bag, and dresses Ashton with Michael’s silent help as Geordie buries her foot in the accelerator, and they leave.

They don’t talk about what’s left behind, how everyone’s covered in blood to different extents. They don’t discuss Dylan, or Ashton’s resistance that he had to be punched into coming along. They don’t talk about Michael shoving Ashton out the window first instead of coming with him, and Luke doesn’t ask about Michael calling his magick to open a hole in someone’s chest. 

They don’t talk about the kills.

Michael doesn’t bring up what he saw when he was alone with The Trinity, either.

Luke’s got one arm around Ashton, who’s unconscious, a hoodie pulled over his head and arms, a pair of sweatpants that look weird with the hoodie. Michael’s on Luke’s other side, body close to the window, heart still drumming against his ribcage like it might leave. There’s a piece of clothing wrapped tightly around Geordie’s arm with a patch of blood, Michael noticed when they got in, but nobody was saying anything, and Michael had forgotten how to make his vocal cords work, so.

They drive fast and in silence for the first hour or so. 

By the time the sun properly comes up, they’re out of the city once again.

* * *

Michael ends up falling asleep with his face pressed to the window, going up and down with the bumps of the open road, used to it by lack of something better, Luke too agitated to offer his shoulder as pillow when he’d needed it. He dreams of nothing, but when he wakes up, the first thing he sees it death.

It’s the oddest thing, like the faces of those men have been printed behind his eyelids. It makes him shiver and snap his eyes open with a start. Then he notices they’re not moving, and the real reason why he was woken up registers: there’s screaming.

His body jerks up and he touches the backseat of the car for some sort of weapon to defend himself, but there’s no imminent threat. Nobody’s screaming out of fear. They’re just yelling at each other.

They’re somewhere arid, the looks of desert too much to ignore. There are hills that go up and down without any pattern around them, but as far as the eye can see, there’s no other car any way Michael looks. The sun is high up, too, probably around midday. Michael squints his eyes to look at it, the moment he sees Ashton and Luke arguing in the distance, and it feels uncomfortable to watch it.

Michael clears his throat and looks around, trying to muffle the yelling.

They’re not close enough that Michael can properly make out the words, though he does hear the word “I” being yelled righteously and “you” being yelled demandingly. He rubs his eyes and slowly the sense of safety comes back. He’s alone in the car, but Geordie is sitting on the trunk of the car, and he can see her and Halsey through the windshield. They’re sharing a bottle of something, squinting at the sun in the distance, looking up and forward and away from Ashton and Luke like they don’t notice the increasingly louder sounds of their voices.

Eventually, he leaves the car. Halsey sees him first, but says nothing, so Geordie looks at him and offers him an acknowledging nod. “If you wanna piss, the bathroom is everywhere.”

The serious tone of voice makes him snort. He does take her advice, though, walks away from them and tries to block out all noises and flashbacks from last night for a few seconds, before he’s rubbing his hands in his already dirty jeans, walking back to them.

Once he comes back, they’re still sharing that bottle and silence, so he rests his hips against the front of the trunk of the jeep, not quite going up, and sighs. Geordie offers him the bottle wordlessly, and he tastes water. It tastes so good that he could scream. Instead he smiles, and after a few sips, gives it back to her.

“Are they arguing because Dylan didn’t come?” Michael asks, looking over his shoulder, past the jeep and at them. Luke’s got his arms spread like he’s either giving up or challenging Ashton. Ashton flips him off. 

The two girls are quiet for another moment, like they hadn’t noticed them, like that’s even a possibility. Then Geordie shakes her head. “He was just mad at first. I think he understands now, would’ve wanted us to lie to Dylan as well if the roles were reversed. He’d want to save him, no matter what.” 

Michael looks at Halsey, who still hasn’t said a word in his direction, and asks: “Did you,” he points at her hands, until she looks down at them too. “Kiss your knuckles too?” She nods, but doesn’t look exactly patient. Michael still insists on conversation. “Why do you do that?”

“They’re apologetic punches. It’s about honor and dignity,” she pauses, raises her eyebrows, and then adds: “You wouldn’t understand.”

The dryness in her tone makes Michael sigh. If he hadn’t directly killed two people last night, one with a gun and one with his magick, maybe he’d have some brattiness left in him to argue and tease, maybe mock and start a fight. But he did kill those people, and he’s so tired, and this is the opposite of what he needs. He doesn’t think it’s what she needs, either.

So instead he asks, sounding as genuinely disarmed as someone like him can: “What is it? Do you still think I’m just using Luke so I can escape? That doesn’t make any sense. What the fuck do I have to do to prove to you that I’m--”

“That you’re what?” she cuts him off, frowning. “Trustworthy? Brave? Dependable?” she pauses again, to each of the words, she tilts her head to the side, widening her eyes for impact. She looks angry, but Michael doesn’t think he’d said anything to provoke that. So he sighs again, and she rolls her eyes, looking away. “You’re none of these things. You don’t deserve to be here.”

He parts his lips, staring at her, not knowing what to say to that.

And she shakes her head, announces, “I’m gonna go piss,” and leaves.

Michael watches her until she disappears behind one of the small hills that surround them, going in the opposite direction of the one Ashton and Luke are, still arguing. It’s only when he’s alone with Geordie that Michael turns to her, with his eyebrows cocked in complete frustration, perhaps a bit of confusion, too, and sighs a third time.

Geordie chuckles lowly, staring ahead. 

“Does she seriously think I’m _faking_ liking Luke or something?”

“It’s not about Luke,” Geordie tells him, but she isn’t looking at him, either. “Before it was time to steal you back from the world of Order, she was the closest Daryl ever got to having a child. He didn’t really have you, before, but he had her. She just wishes she was in your shoes. Once she gets over herself, you two will be fine.”

Michael frowns at Geordie, keeps looking at her until she looks at him, too. “Halsey actually likes Daryl. In a creepy father/daughter way. As in, she actually wishes the most dangerous Chaos witch was her dad,” he says, leaning closer to Geordie and lowering his voice, because even saying the words in a normal tone of voice seems obscene. Geordie just nods slowly, apparently amused by his shock. “How fucked up was her Order family for her to want something like that?!”

“Very,” Geordie tells him, and takes another sip of water.

Michael doesn’t get it, in a way that he’s not sure he’d ever be capable of getting.

There’s something about the way he was raised, with Karen always looking after him, making sure he was shielded from any danger, that although smothering, also felt very caring. He didn’t have much time to think about Daryl and the fact that he’d cursed Michael by being his father. Most of the time, he’d pretend John Gordon really was his father. And it’d be nice, being the orphan of one, when he had Karen on the other side. 

If he thought about Daryl at all, he’d just be thinking about how much he hated him for genetics. The fact that he was too tall, that he could gain weight easily but gaining muscle was hard, how slowly his hair grew. And Chaos. Of course, Chaos was at the top of the list.

But he can’t think about what could’ve been bad enough that Halsey gladly took Daryl as family.

And then he remembers Luke, what had happened to his family, and he feels his heart sink. He wishes someone had been around, so it wasn’t so hard. Not that Luke had ever properly complained, in these few weeks, but it’d felt like he should. Michael thinks he wouldn’t shut up about it if it had been with him.

He looks over his shoulder, in time to see Luke and Ashton coming back to the jeep.

He hadn’t noticed the yelling ceasing.

They’re walking side by side but it looks like there are miles between them. It’s in the way that Luke keeps his eyes on the ground underneath his shoes keeps frowning, in the way Ashton looks like he may have cried, and his jaw still looks sore by Halsey’s punch, but mostly it’s just the redness of his eyes, how he sniffs when he gets finally close enough to the jeep. They move differently, too, like they’re afraid of mimicking each other’s steps, like there could be nothing worse.

It makes Michael uncomfortable to watch, more than it did to watch Dylan hug him or Ashton with his head rested on Luke’s shoulder. Because it’s jealousy on reverse. It’s feeling bad that something looks like it’s dying, and Luke should have had enough of things dying on him.

Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, unsure.

Halsey comes back to them a little before Luke and Ashton finally catch up, and soon all five of them are united by the back of the jeep, Geordie still sitting on the trunk, Michael still resting his weight against it without sitting, Halsey on one side, Luke and Ashton on the other. There’s silence, awkward but not unbearable, and Michael can’t help noticing the small things then, like how Ashton’s feet must be burning against the boiling hot sand he was stepping on before and now the aslphant, but he still seems unphased by it. Like Luke looks like he’s run a marathon, just from the emotional exhaustion, when he was fine running up nine floors worth in stairs. Geordie takes another sip of her water, and Halsey’s the first to speak, staring from Ashton to Luke.

“You two done? Can we go home?”

The last word makes Michael feel funny.

He pushes the thoughts of it aside, squinting at the sun behind Luke and Ashton to look at them.

Luke snorts, sounding bitter and older than Michael’s seen him since they were in the motel. “Sure. Ashton’s decided he’s going to be a dick about it, inflexibly,” he raises his eyebrows. Ashton only shakes his head and breathes out heavily, so Luke glares at him, and insists, telling the whole group, but without taking his eyes off Ashton. “What he saw involves me. And he won’t tell me about it.”

“It won’t matter,” Ashton says, sounding small, the person who holds that black beast within. He adds: “I told you that. It’s better if you don’t know. It’ll mess up your head.”

“You said,” Luke turns to him, and his voice becomes louder again. Michael wants to look away, wants to look at Geordie or Halsey, wants to see if they’ve ever seen this side of loud, angry, wronged Luke, but he can’t take his eyes off him and the spark in his eyes. It’s terrifying, in a way, Michael thinks, in a way that maybe lions in the wild are scary. The reason to be scared logical but distant, unreachable. Michael’s only fascinated. “That we had to kill everyone who saw it. You ripped someone’s heart out because they tried to tell a guard that was going to die anyway. You kept telling me you’d tell me later, but you killed everyone viciously when they tried to say a word about it, until they were all dead.”

He lists those like accusations, one worse than the other. Nobody else says a word.

“To protect you,” Ashton breathes out, defeated, turning to Luke with his shoulders down. “To protect you, you stubborn little baby,” he spits the last few words, and it looks like his eyes are welling up again. Michael holds his breath, because everyone there can see that he’s cracking, that he won’t be able to hold it in any longer. And Michael sort of wishes he could. Sort of wishes he could keep shut because something as terrible as that is better left unknown. He tries thinking of something to say, but Ashton’s resumed talking already. “I don’t want you to think about something that may not even happen.”

“It always happens,” Luke scoffs, but his voice changes. Michael wonders if Luke knows that he’s cursed just like Michael knows that he is, too. “Whatever The Trinity sees happens.”

“But nobody has to know about it,” he says, defensively, and looks away from Luke. He looks at Geordie and at Halsey, like Ashton expects them to come to his rescue, give him something to work with, but Geordie just sips on her water again, and Halsey looks at Michael.

From all things she could’ve done, she looks at Michael.

Michael clears his throat, and that gets Luke’s attention. He licks his lips, takes a tentative step his way, and touches his arm. “Luke,” he tries, but he doesn’t know where to go from there, so he makes it up as he goes, speaking before talking, as he’s done pretty much all his life up until the point his life ended and he was arrested for his genes. “Maybe he’s got a point, alright?”

For a second, Luke doesn’t say anything, either. He just looks at Michael.

Like he’s considering, pondering. It’s unnerving, but not in a way that makes Michael scared. It’s unnerving in a way that makes him anxious, wanting to kiss away everything he has to say.

“It’s time you know anyway,” Luke says, and though Halsey starts to say something, interrupt him, he speaks over her, louder and clearer than her stuttering makes her to be. “There was something else, Michael, about you. Another prophecy that involved you that had nothing to do with me breaking you out of the Order Prison. The Trinity saw you defeat Daryl. Saw you overthrow him, take his place. Saw you leading Chaos instead of him.” 

At that, Michael stops.

And he gets what Luke means, about needing to know.

But he also wishes he didn’t.

He frowns, stops touching him, crosses his arms instead, and can’t stop frowning, can’t stop his mind from going places. Because it shouldn’t be true, shouldn’t make sense; a few weeks ago he wouldn’t have even accepted the possibility of such thing as The Trinity even existing. But she’s real, and Michael knows that much not from being in her presence, but from feeling the weight of her hand of truth before his eyes. It makes him feel hollow and odd, staring down at his feet and taking deep breaths because he can’t hear his own head.

His thoughts are too loud and slurred. They don’t connect or make sense.

If Luke was to tell him at all, he wishes it hadn’t been like that, as a counter-argument to stop pushing for the thing Ashton saw. Luke must see it, too, that he shouldn’t have, because he parts his lips and starts saying something, but he gives up, and Michael recoils anyway, breathing through his mouth and feeling his mind spiralling away.

Geordie wraps an arm around his shoulders, sympathetic, pitiful, something.

Michael doesn’t know. 

He can’t think. Much less to identify Geordie’s motivations.

But he hears Halsey sigh heavily, say like she means it: “You’re an idiot, Luke.”

“It’s so important to you,” Ashton says, out of nowhere, and Michael really wishes he would stop, that he’d learn from Michael’s paralysis that you shouldn’t say things like that, even if the person wants to hear them, but Ashton doesn’t. He’s cracked already, somewhere along the minutes spent yelling at each other or when Luke proved his point that the truth must prevail by making Michael’s mind spin away from him. “It worked, Luke. Their drug worked.”

Michael’s still staring down, focusing hard on how to breathe, feeling that he can’t, can’t at all, and then Geordie’s arm goes rigid around him, tightens the hold in a way that hurts his shoulders a bit, and nobody says a word, not at all, for what feels like forever.

His breathing rhythm gets worse. He can’t breathe through his nose at all anymore. All he thinks about is prophecies and how they ruin everything. So he tries breathing through his mouth, but it’s too fast or not enough, and his head starts hurting too much, and he’s hyperventilating, feels like he might have a panic attack coming.

Then there are steps his way. Luke stops right in front of him, and with a frown of someone who looks just inches away from the precipice himself, he touches Michael’s shoulders until Michael looks up at him. When he does, Luke tells him: “Michael, breathe. Remember to breathe.”

And the words make sense to him.

He looks at Luke’s eyes, his baby blue eyes with no apparent magick behind, and he can breathe properly.

And then Ashton’s words also make sense to him, and everything does fall apart.

The drug for mind control that the humans developed, Jack and Luke stole and Luke took, worked.


	13. my mind's like a deadly disease

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you from the bottom of my heart. u guys are awesome!   
> just wanna give a shout-out to the beautiful [arts](http://mikesaysgrrr.tumblr.com/post/130487899925/i-made-luke-and-halsey-versions-too-im-starting) that [mikesaysgrrr](http://mikesaysgrrr.tumblr.com/post/130487899925/i-made-luke-and-halsey-versions-too-im-starting) has done. they're _amazing_.  
>  as usual, comments make me v happy and are much appreciated. alas, tho: happy reading!!! ^________^
> 
> ♥♥♥

There’s an insistent drumming in the jeep, Geordie’s nails tapping against the console of the car, her foot thrown over the panel, in an angle that can’t be comfortable, but her expression is relaxed, which is all the more annoying to Michael. She has no place relaxing, her window rolled down, an elbow out, breathing steady, humming to a song Michael doesn’t know under her breath. 

Luke’s driving, which is good, because then they don’t have to pretend like everything that happened and was said didn’t happen and wasn’t said, and Michael can instead just pretend that he’s asleep, with his body pressed against the side of the car. Ashton’s between him and Halsey, and every now and then, Ashton gives him a look, like he knows he’s pretending, but he won’t tell if Michael doesn’t tell on him.

He’s also keeping quiet and to himself, eyes open but not looking like he’s any more awake than Halsey, who’s definitely asleep, snoring softly with her face against Ashton’s chest. He has both arms around her, and sometimes he combs her long blue hair, swallowing hard, keeping a frown on his face, all to show just how far from relaxed he is. Michael doesn’t know how Geordie does it, truly.

Michael hasn’t looked Luke’s way since he set his jaw and stared at him, feeling his breath steady as if on command, shoulders dropped and a nervous itching under his skin that Luke could just order him to stop his anxiety from crippling him. It was Geordie who stopped a further reaction from either of them, though, deciding they needed to get going, that none of them had any food and it was time to eat already, and then they all just silently walked to the jeep, Luke took the driver’s seat, and nobody said anything anymore. 

That must’ve been about forty minutes ago.

Michael’s stomach is in a knot of hunger and sickness, and all of them smell of blood. But mostly it’s his head that he worries about. He can’t stop thinking about everything, too big and overwhelming to set his thoughts on one thing alone, so he ends up focusing on how Geordie keeps tapping her fingers and sings softly: “When all of this is done, and all but one is dead and gone, you’ll tell the story of who I once was, you’ll tell everyone of how I died the way I lived… with blood on my hands and love in my heart…”

Michael sighs.

It’s quiet, but from the angle he’s in, unable to be looked at through the rearview mirror but still in position to catch Luke’s shoulders, he sees them tense, how he raises his head just a bit, probably searching from Michael, finding only Ashton and a bit of Halsey instead. But he doesn’t ask a thing. So Michael doesn’t say anything, either.

And admittedly, he’d like to. He’d like to say a lot, and ask a lot, and he thinks he’d very much like to cry. He hasn’t mourned anything, from the people he’s killed to the people who have killed him. He would like to ask Ashton about his mother, and what was it that Dylan said that people seem to think he’s dead. He’d just like to… feel comfortable enough to cry. And he’s glad that he doesn’t fear Halsey anymore and that Geordie put her hand over Michael’s shoulder when he was too much in shock to react to anything. But it’s still not like what it was with Luke in room 93, just the two of them and the easy quiet comfort of sharing a bed and playing twenty questions.

The memory sounds almost fake now, like he must’ve made that up. 

“There’s a gas station there,” Luke says, and Geordie hums in interest. “Want to stop to see if there’s a convenience store where we can get food?”

Geordie shifts position so she’s sitting properly. “Yeah, God, yes. And a bathroom. And clothes.”

Michael thinks of last time they stopped in a gas station, and he just wants to cry more.

Instead he forces his voice to come out, and says: “That’d be good, Luke.”

Luke doesn’t tell him anything. No sign that he even listened.

Michael shakes his head quietly and rolls his eyes, staring out the window instead, trying to force himself out of the car, projecting his thoughts as hard as he can out of his head, that Luke should stop, that they should talk. That he needs to hug Luke and kiss his mouth and say that he’s equal parts angry that Luke revealed what he did the way he did, and just in desperate need of comfort, of his arms, of his lips pressing against his forehead. He tries to force the thoughts out of his head, but unlike Luke, Michael can’t force him to say anything.

So Luke tells him nothing.

Luke parks the car in front of the convenience store. It isn’t as big as last time, not nearing the city but at least five hours away. Everything there looks like it’s been trashed at least five times this year: the walls, the doors, the people inside and the people still in the jeep. Everything’s at least half-broken, from the glass door with a sign that only says W LCOME to them, as Luke touches Ashton’s hand as if that’s supposed to be enough to tell him that he should wake up Halsey.

But even though Halsey may be right, and maybe he doesn’t deserve to be there, communication doesn’t seem to be a problem. Ashton gives him a small smile, and whispers something, more to Halsey’s hair than to her ears, but she smiles in her sleepiness, so it must’ve been something nice.

Michael thinks of what it’d have to be whispered in his ear that would make him smile. The selection he comes up with isn’t vast, but they involve lots of things he can’t get at the moment. For example, Luke’s voice.

Luke gets out of the car first, gestures so Geordie leaves too, but she ignores him, and instead turns around to look at Michael, Ashton, and Halsey.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” she tells Halsey with a smile, that doesn’t look as broken as the cracked walls or their lives. Halsey giggles quietly, so she adds: “We’re at a convenience store. How do you feel about some food?” 

Ashton clears his throat, says, “Um, I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but we’re all covered in blood. What makes you think the people inside won’t just call the Order and say there’s crazy Chaos on the loose?” he cocks an eyebrow.

“Technically, only Luke’s Chaos here,” Halsey raises her head to Ashton, as if she finds that hilarious. They all sort of laugh at that, and then Halsey’s eyes fall on Michael, and she sighs, adding: “Or he’s the only one full-Chaos, anyway.” But it doesn’t seem like something bad. She doesn’t wrinkle her nose or look away immediately. Michael chuckles lowly, and she sort of smiles.

“Anyway, Order boy spending too much time away from home,” Geordie mocks, rolling her eyes. And then she looks out of the jeep, and back at Ashton. “Does that answer your question?” she points to out the windshield mirror.

They all look.

Michael sees Luke with a gun raised to the ceiling, pointing at what looks like a closet. There are people running towards it with their hands raised. Michael sighs once more.

The fact that he’s the last to leave the car doesn’t have to do with the fact that he’ll have to be sitting in a table with Luke, eating frozen food just out of the microwave. It has to do with the fact that he can’t bring himself to, not really. Ashton and Halsey are both out of the car and eating with Luke inside when Geordie comes back for him, opens the door of the jeep unceremoniously, and says:

“You playing the prisoner part, now? Don’t you think that’s so two weeks ago?”

Michael shrugs, but still doesn’t move, so she rolls her eyes and rests her weight on the door, making a face and looking away. Michael clears his throat and it sort of hurts. He asks her, quietly: “Has it only been two weeks? Feels like more.”

“Give or take,” she says, and then, out of nowhere: “He’s losing his fucking grip.”

Snorting, he looks away, too, because there’s only so much staring he can do when the other person won’t look back. “How’s that my fault,” he half-states, half-asks.

“It isn’t, but it’s sort of, like,” she starts, frowning, and then shakes her head, like she means to rewind and start over. “Ashton feels like shit because he thinks it’s his fault Luke’s like that because he’s the one who told him. Halsey’s playing happy camper because for once she can stop thinking about what the fuck she’s going to do when we arrive back home and not only Luke’s alive, but Ashton’s also unexpectedly back. Then there’s you, brooding, as usual,” she adds the last two words with emphasis and raised eyebrows, and the teasing way she says it sort of makes Michael snort. “But Luke’s losing his shit.”

“Well, the psycho behavior isn’t really new,” Michael says.

It’s a stupid impulse. He’s bitter. He regrets the words as they come out.

Geordie gives him a look like she knows he does, but it still can’t go by unpunished. 

Her way of punishing is in her eyes, the way she narrows them a bit as she stares at Michael, like she dares him to repeat the words, like she dares him to actually think something like that. It makes him feel ashamed, like he should apologize, and he feels like crying a thousand times more. But he’s got to be strong, stronger than that, at least, crying in front of a not-friend who doesn’t really care for him as long as he keeps Luke from doing whatever the hell he’s doing.

She shakes her head in disgust. And walks away from him, back to her allies, her real friends.

Michael sinks down in the seat, covers his face with his hands, swears into his hands because the only thing he regrets more than saying what he’s just said, is feeling all the things he’s just felt, and wondering if it’d be better to still to be locked up in an Order cell, waiting for Karen’s never-coming rescue team, too drugged to feel anything. Now he feels everything. 

It takes him a few more minutes to get out of the jeep, but he does. He walks to the table carefully. The aisles haven’t been scavenged yet, nothing done about the cash register or anything except the food, but there’s a heated hamburger twice as big as his fist getting cold between Geordie and Ashton. He takes the seat, staring down at the food, and with his dirty hands, he brings it to his mouth, ignoring that Luke’s sitting right in front of him, and ignoring that he can still hear himself say what he wishes he hadn’t.

Ashton was saying something. He doesn’t stop because Michael’s finally decided to show up. “So anyway, Dylan and I are cats, right, and we’re literally just lying on the ground trying to catch some sun, and then who comes? Eki fucking Brown,” he rolls his eyes, drops his head back, makes an exaggerated annoyed expression.

Halsey and Geordie both laugh like they think it’s genuinely funny. Luke chuckles lowly.

Michael figures there’s no point in telling them he went to school with her.

“She hates it when we choose to be anything that isn’t exactly feral,” Ashton rolls his eyes, and snorts. Halsey starts saying something, her face in a funny frown, but he adds: “I know what you have to say about cats, and fuck off, Halz, they’re great. I love being a cat.”

Halsey flips him off and stuffs her mouth with hamburger. Geordie shakes her head with a small smile. “You’re so full of shit. I bet the Brown girl never even learned your name. She could care less if you choose to shapeshift into a cat or a jaguar. She just cares about Dylan.”

Michael finds a little bit of courage in him, so he raises his eyes to Ashton and asks: “How does your magick work?” 

His voice is so small that it could go unnoticed, he supposes, if it wasn’t for how the only other people in a hundred miles ratio are locked in a closet. But Ashton takes a deep breath, and gives him a chance, because he doesn’t know what Michael’s just said, and that Michael’s not a good enough person, not even good enough to hang out with a group of killers bathed in drying blood. “I… I can basically turn into any feline ever. So can Dylan. We sort of grew up together, so we started developing magick together, too. It was probably supposed to be an all-animals thing, but we always joked about being allergic to cats, so we just… became each other’s cats? I guess? Is that really stupid?”

Michael smiles. “It isn’t.”

“Michael’s a liar,” Halsey snorts. “That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Instead of flipping her off or rolling his eyes at her, Ashton smiles a very bright smile, and wraps his big arm around her to bring her closer, enough that he can touch the top of her head with his lips. She struggles against it, with an offended expression on her face, but it makes Michael feel safer and like maybe she may not have meant it when she said that he didn’t deserve to be there, just like he didn’t mean it when he said that thing about Luke.

God, he didn’t.

He looks at Luke.

Luke’s staring down at his plastic plate. It’s empty now, but he’s still chewing on his bottom lip like he’s hungry, but Michael knows he’s just anxious. His eyebrows are knitted together in focus, like he’s thinking of something that can’t possibly be interrupted, not even by giggles of his friends, not even by Geordie teasing Ashton for only being jealous of Dylan and Eki, which he answers by saying that she is, categorically, out of her fucking mind. 

Feeling bold or just really disconnected, Michael reaches for Luke’s hand across the table, covering the back of his hand tentatively. For the first split second, he thinks maybe this will do. Then Luke flinches and yanks his hand back, and shakes his head, mouthing a breathed out: “Sorry,” that makes Michael’s heart sink.

Yeah, he’s sorry, too.

If the other three have noticed, they’re kind enough to not bring it up. Ashton says that he’s going to see if he can take a shower in the staff only bathroom, and the second he stands up and skips Luke when he looks at them all, Michael knows that Ashton’s just as nervous with being alone with Luke as he is. Only for different reasons.

All he did was tell the truth.

All Michael did was… he isn’t sure what is it that he did, exactly, so he frowns, and tells Geordie and Halsey: “Do you guys mind like, is it okay if you give us a minute?”

And they nod, leave, they all leave, until Luke looks wants to leave as well, but Michael sighs and gives him a look, and he figures he should look broken and lost enough, because Luke presses his lips together and then shuts his eyes, and when he opens his eyes again, they’re welled up. “I’m so sorry,” he repeats, and this time, he seems to properly mean it, mean it about everything, and Michael doesn’t like that. It makes him want to scream at Luke to just stop being sorry and start kissing him instead. 

But he just blinks a couple of times, staring at him, and parts his lips in confusion.

“The way I see it,” Michael starts, after clearing his throat to force the words out. “You’re the one who snapped at me, told me something I wish I didn’t know, and then proceeded to avoid me like the plague.” He pauses, staring at his unfinished hamburger between them, and though he’s hungry, he still sets it aside, staring at his hands around the wrapper. “Wouldn’t even look at me. Like you were disgusted or something.”

“Oh, shit,” Luke says, and then laughs, quiet and sad and shaking his head, covering his face with one of his hands, sniffing and rubbing his eyes, and Michael doesn’t want to see that, either. 

Last time he tried to touch him, though, Luke seemed like he pretty much would rather have Order guards touching him instead, and Michael’s ego can only go through so much. So he takes a deep breath, and he looks away, out the broken glass door, past their jeep and all the shadow, and onto the desert, where nobody says oh-shit when you tell them they’re disgusted at you.

“You don’t get it, do you,” Luke says.

It’s just the way he says it already, not a question, open to possibilities, to maybe yes or maybe no or maybe working on it. It’s a very firm and decisive statement, closing off a chapter, saying this is it: Michael doesn’t get it. He doesn’t think he does, really, he misses lying with Luke in bed and falling asleep with their legs entangled. He kind of hates himself for thinking he’d get it. He wouldn’t get it. Of course he doesn’t get it. When will he get it? These things aren’t for him. Lying in bed with someone who remembers to buy your freaking gummy worms is for people like Calum and Maddy, like Calum’s mother and father before him. 

No. He does not get it.

“I am sorry I told you about the prophecy,” Luke starts over, after a deep breath, and out of the corner of his eye Michael sees Luke moving, but he doesn’t register how much, because he’s still trying to find something in the desert that will tell him he’ll one day get it. “It wasn’t my place to tell you, especially not like that. Not because I think it’s a bad thing. I wanted to tell you the second I met you. But you hated Chaos and you wouldn’t be happy, so I figured it was better not to tell you at all.”

For a second there, Michael listens to the almost childish kindness that had endeared him so much, almost from the get-go, confusingly so at first. What he says is: “I didn’t hate Chaos,” he lies, and they both know it’s a lie, but Luke doesn’t call him out on it, so he keeps his lie like he’ll keep the blanket too, even if Luke decides to hate him. “I didn’t know Chaos. I still don’t.”

Luke nods, but doesn’t say anything for another second. 

Then, Michael insists: “It’s not about that.”

And it isn’t a question just like Luke’s you-don’t-get-it-do-you wasn’t. 

Michael doesn’t get it, and Luke is full of shit.

“Yeah,” Luke says, after a pause that seems too long. He takes a deep breath and then another, and eventually Michael finds himself looking at him again, because there’s nothing else to do and his heart isn’t even so nervous anymore. He just needs to know if Luke’s gotten tired or what was it, or, or, or. So he looks at him, and Luke offers him a sad sad sad smile, and his eyes are sort of red. “You remember my scars, right? You remember how I got them?”

“I got it when Ashton said it,” Michael replies, drier than he’d intended. “The drug you took, then the Order caught you, and they tried to find it, but there was nothing substantial.”

“I never thought it’d worked, either,” Luke breathes out with a snort, like Michael’s just said the opposite. “They kept me open for days, trying to find something in my blood or my organs that made it seem like it’d worked. There was no alteration,” he lowers his head, shakes it a bit, and then adds, shakily: “You have to believe me, I didn’t know.”

Michael blinks slowly at him, but doesn’t find anything to say.

“It’s mind control, Michael,” Luke adds, eventually, meeting his eyes once again. He looks closer to crying, which is better than he was before they got to the gas station, closer to shooting someone. “That’s what the drug was about.”

“I know,” Michael replies, frowning. “I remember you said it.”

“Well, then why doesn’t it look like we’re talking about the same thing?!” Luke says.

Except he doesn’t really say it as much as he screams it, and the tears start rolling down his cheeks, and he looks away like he means to hide, like Michael won’t see him if only he turns away from him enough. It breaks Michael’s heart all the more, and he knows what this is about, of course he does, but he still can’t bring his mind to go there, because if he does, then it’ll be the two of them losing it, and one of them needs to have a more or less clear mind.

His head has never really been that clear. It’s the sort of he’s hanging on to.

Michael presses his lips together, and stands up from his chair, sits in Geordie’s instead, and because that’s still not good enough, he drags the chair a little closer, and his knee touches the side of Luke’s thigh, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move away, so Michael touches his knee, squeezes it a bit so Luke looks at him again.

Luke sniffs, and there’s so much there, so much in his face, in his pain, that Michael wants to kiss away. It makes him cry, too, harder than he’d like to, and because he figures with Luke he’s always safe, he touches the side of his face, wet with tears, and covers Luke’s lips with his. 

They taste to salt and pain and a little bit of blood, but Luke closes his eyes first, shoulders going down, moving his lips slowly against Michael’s. He leans into Michael’s hand, and it sort of makes him feel like this could be it, this could be the point where nothing else matters, of magick or society or fate. He could just take off with Luke and it’d all be okay.

Then Luke breaks the kiss, and his hand is touching Michael’s, but not to hold it, but put it away from him. He lets go of Michael’s hand, and not meeting his eyes, he says: “That was the last time.”

Michael freezes on spot, a disconcerted half-smile on his face, like this may be a joke.

He tilts his head to the side, breathes out: “What?!”

Luke shakes his head, looks away again, and he sounds unlike himself when he says: “None of that was real, alright? I spent literal _years_ of my life wanting to meet you. The reason I was alive, the reason my brother and I became Daryl’s protegees when so many were dying in the late years of the war, when Jack and I were fine. You were the reason we were safe. But you--” he pauses, swallows on the little of himself that wants to come up for air, and that ugly cynical version comes out again instead, refusing to look at Michael, and by that, also refusing to speak the truth. “You had no reason to like me. Alright? Face it. I’m the guy who put handcuffs on you and told you that you were coming to the one person you loathed the most in the world.” He pauses again, frowns, and when he looks back at Michael, Michael’s a little taken aback by how serious he looks, how certain, how he looks like a whole different person. “I _made you_ like me, okay? I made you trust me and I made you like me, and eventually I made you kiss me back and sleep with me. I didn’t know that I was doing it, and I’m truly, genuinely, very fucking sorry that I did what I did. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not real.”

Face it? How can Michael face any of that, when the real Luke won’t face him saying that?

His vision is too blurry for him to see much of Luke anyway.

There’s a lump in his throat. He tries to swallow it down, but it scratches his throat.

“I just,” Luke snorts, looks away once again, shuts his eyes. “I wanted you so much, I kept hoping you’d like me back, but all this time, I was just _making_ you, and that’s so fucking unfair,” he breathes out the last word with a bitter laugh, like he means it’s more unfair to him than to Michael.

And Michael’s lips tremble, and he shakes his head, but the words still don’t come in time to interrupt him from saying more, which is bad bad bad, because every word is another he can’t unhear and will echo in his head for hours later, but he isn’t fast enough, isn’t a good enough match for Luke’s angry hurt ego and the sense of worthlessness that seems to drag them both down.

“You never cared about me,” he says, finally, like that settles it.

Michael hates him for saying it.

He breathes out slowly, as slow as he can in the state he’s in -- the state he wants to beg Luke to get him out of, because he knows Luke’s capable of it, with one kiss that doesn’t feel like goodbye, and then Michael’s brand new -- and tries his best to stop the hiccups from the crying. Instead he keeps breathing, tries to steady his breath like Luke’s told him to, and maybe _made_ him do. 

But the words come out. Eventually, they do.

“You were the first person to not want to hurt me in so long,” Michael chuckles lowly, a little embarrassed, a little desperate, a little everything at once. “You touched me and I felt like I was less of the freak I know I am, and more of a real person. Do you have any idea what that’s like? To feel like you’re not real at all? That’s how fucked up you are. You start thinking someone may have thought you up. Then someone touches you, and you know every little beautiful thing in the world is worth fighting for, because you’re in it for good, you’re real and you exist and so this life must be worth fighting too,” he shrugs, meets Luke’s eyes, and Luke holds his gaze, even if he looks like he wants to argue, like he wants to interrupt Michael. He still doesn’t, and it’s the way that he looks at Michael that breaks it for Michael, makes him snort, roll his eyes. “What am I saying? Of course you know what I’m talking about. I know you felt the same. And you know how the fuck I know that, Luke?” he raises his eyebrows, coming closer, not close enough to kiss, but close enough for confront. “Because it was fucking real. It is.”

Luke stops, and he’s crying so, so hard, that Michael doesn’t know what to do about it. 

His own crying slows down as he gets some things out of his chest, but Luke’s still shaking, and Michael wishes these past few weeks weren’t enough for him to find him so transparent. Because every second that Luke doesn’t say a word, Michael knows he’s hating on himself.

“Lukey, don’t,” he begs, pleads, and against Luke’s protests and sighs, he takes both of Luke’s hands in his, and holds them so tight that it may hurt, but he doesn’t care. He’s real and he needs to make sure Luke can’t forget that.

“I don’t want to make you do anything,” Luke breathes out, a quiet whine, and Michael takes a deep breath, looking at him, but that’s _his_ Luke coming up for air, so he waits, and squeezes his hands. “Admit it happened. With the breathing thing, more than once,” he raises his eyebrows, as if daring Luke to tell him he’s wrong.

Michael snorts, rolling his eyes, shaking his head, mad and out of control. “You mean like when I was freaking out, couldn’t make my fucking mouth and nose work and _breathe_ , and you were oh-so-manipulative to tell me to breathe? That’s what you mean?” he pauses. Luke breathes out slowly, like the thought reminds him to breathe, too. “Luke, please,” Michael adds, the vehemence leaving him as the pleading comes back, staring down at Luke’s hands still trapped between his. “You don’t want me, then alright, I won’t fight you on that. But don’t tell me it’s because it isn’t real. Don’t tell me what I feel or not feel. I trusted you because you were the single kindest person I have ever met in my life. I liked you because you have a nice smile even when you’re high on adrenaline, and because you’re so… beautiful,” he says, finally, with a little shrug. He means it in a broader way than physically, and he hopes Luke gets it, but he doesn’t elaborate. “I kissed you back because I’d been thinking about kissing you for days. I slept with you because I feel like if I didn’t, I couldn’t forgive myself,” he pauses, shaking his head a bit again, eyes going back at their hands. “I care about you. Don’t tell me my feelings aren’t real. I spent months in a prison being a not-person, and not-people don’t get to have feelings. I’m real now. I have feelings. Don’t take that away from me.”

Luke seems to hold his breath until he can’t anymore. 

And when he breathes in and out heavily, he looks a wrecked, sad, but a tiny bit hopeful, so Michael knows it’s not useless and pointless. Without waiting for a change of heart, Michael takes each of Luke’s hands in his, places them both on his waist, and wraps his arms around Luke’s shoulders. He was sort of expecting Luke to break the hug before it even happened, so it surprises him how fast Luke drops his head to his shoulder, how his hands touch his waist tentatively at first, like he’d already forgotten how to, and then he properly holds him, hands firm and strong and pulling him closer. 

Michael closes his eyes, touches the back of Luke’s head with one of his hands.

“How do we know for sure that I didn’t force you into something, Michael?”

Michael smiles quietly with his eyes closed, keeping him close enough that he can feel it against his chest when Luke swallows down his sobbing to force himself to be calmer now. “You’ll have to trust me,” he answers, running his fingers up Luke’s hair, trying to soothe his demons, because it’d never been his goal to drive them away, no one can be that powerful. But to soothe them, then that’s something he needs to take pride in saying he’s capable of. “Can you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Luke admits, as honest as ever, voice muffled by how his face is still buried in Michael’s shoulder. “What if I hurt you?”

Michael snorts. “We all hurt each other all the time. Required part of being alive.”

Luke snorts, too.

They’re like that for a moment, quiet and lost in each other’s embrace, the two girls sharing a stolen pack of cigarettes far away but still under the shadow that the gas station casts on the pavement, Ashton still in the bathroom. It feels like they’re alone, except for the friends who’ll guard their lives with teeth and waving hands and bullets. It makes Michael want to cry again, so he does, this time not as desperate as before, just tears that roll down his cheeks as if he’s allowing himself to say another thousands of things he can’t organize in his head enough to say yet.

When Luke breaks the hug, he’s looking at Michael like he may be embarrassed, so Michael moves closer and kisses his tears-covered cheeks, the spots just under his eyes, the tip of his nose, his forehead, and when Luke closes his eyes, both of his eyelids, too.

“You’re,” he starts, but he doesn’t know how to finish it, so he hopes Luke understands.

Luke licks his lips, looking Michael in the eye, and taking a deep breath.

“I need to be more aware of it. I need to learn to deal with this added dose of freakiness,” he starts, and Michael sort of wants to smile, that Luke thinks of himself as a freak as much as Michael thinks of himself as a freak too, but it isn’t the type of thing you smile at, but are sad about, but you’d have to truly see yourself as a freak to understand the beauty in it. “But be easy on me.”

Michael nods slowly, dutifully, because as long as Luke believes him, or wants to anyway, he feels that maybe, anything that Luke means by that could be okay. 

“Can I kiss you?” he asks.

His voice is so small and shy, it makes Luke bite back a smile. He likes that, the initial smile, the muscles of Luke’s face moving to let that smile that makes his face light up in, even if just for a second. “I don’t know,” he admits.

“You don’t know if you want me to kiss you?” Michael starts. Luke nods, frowning a little, his cheeks burning, and Michael makes face, shrugs. “Well, then fuck your whole theory about how you made me want to kiss you, because even when you’re not sure of what the fuck you want to do yourself, I’m still a hundred per cent sure I want to kiss you.”

Luke smiles. Properly smiles.

And he looks a mess, with his red and blue eyes, and his face damp, but he still smiles for real, so Michael thinks he looks like the most beautiful boy in the world. Luke leans closer to him, too, his thumbs rubbing the sides of Michael’s waist gently as he closes his eyes, touching his nose to Michael’s first, and for the longest time, Michael thinks that’s as close as they’ll be.

He closes his eyes, too, breathes in the moment and not of everything else. He leans into him and his touch, one hand in the back of Luke’s neck, the other on his chest, and when they breathe and their lips part, their lips brush lightly, very very very lightly. It sends waves of electricity up Michael’s spine, and he knows it’s enough, and he doesn’t mind, and it’s all going to be alright.

And then Luke kisses him, a real kiss to match Michael’s real feelings, presses his lips to Michael’s, and when Michael presses back, Luke parts his lips. Michael catches Luke’s bottom lip, his piercing, between his teeth, and Luke smiles against him, presses his body closer to him even with the awkward sitting position, and Michael smiles, too, deepens the kiss before he knows what he’s doing. His heart drums loudly, muffles all the crying and all the other sounds, and when their tongues slide together, Michael could swear that he’s never felt anything more divine.

Kissing him like this, Michael’s sure they’re both immortals, and this could go on forever.

Michael pulls away eventually, because he can’t make himself keep breathing through his nose anymore and his jaw aches a bit, and when he pulls back, he chuckles, eyelids half-closed and stolen pecks going between them without anyone keeping score of who’s the thief.

They both are.

They’re thieves and they’re freaks and they’re fucked up, but at least they’re real.

“I’m scared,” Luke tells him, matter-of-factly, when he looks Michael in the eye again.

Michael gives him a quiet smile. “Good. It’ll make you strong, give them all a reason to be scared.”

Luke smirks at him.

* * *

They walk side-by-side and with their shoulders and hands brushing but not properly touching all the way up to the girls, and when they sit on the pavement next to them, nobody says a word for a moment. Luke drops his hand around Michael’s shoulders, and Michael touches his inner thigh, sighing contently. 

Halsey asks, “Are you two,” but shrugs, like she doesn’t know how to complete the question.

“We’re working on it,” Luke tells her, and Geordie chuckles.

* * *

This employers only bathroom is the most luxurious thing they’ve had since room 93. It’s better, in the way that it looks cleaner, even after Ashton quickly showers there first. But there are no mirrors, so Michael holds Luke’s hands and walks in it bringing Luke with him, saying he’s going to need someone to tell him whether his hair looks okay.

Luke sort of just giggles at that, but when they’re taking a shower together, he cries.

Michael kisses his temple and hugs him and rubs the small of his back and whispers things he doesn’t truly know the meaning of, like that they’re going to be alright, and everyone’s safe, and they will be, and once they get to wherever it is that they’re going, things are just going to get better.

He doesn’t believe in any of it, but Luke seems to, so it’s good enough for the time being.

When they leave the bathroom eventually, Halsey and Geordie are annoyed at how long they took, and Ashton’s opened a bag of chips, after storing the jeep with as much food as he could buy. He also says he opened the door to the closet where the employees were, and gave them water and food, called Luke psycho, but smirked, so Luke smiled back a little apologetically, and rested his chin on Michael’s shoulder.

Halsey and Geordie went to shower together to save time, they said. 

Michael’s only comment is: “I think they don’t hate me. Or not anymore, anyway.”

Luke chuckles and says: “Of course they don’t.”

Ashton throws another chip in his mouth with an amused look forward, and says: “They hate everyone except for each other.”

* * *

Before they leave, Halsey, Geordie, and Luke disappear in the aisles of food, deciding what’s really useful to bring along for the ten hours or so they still have of traveling, and Michael and Ashton are left sitting on the trunk of the jeep, sharing that bag of chips that Ashton opened before.

Michael manages about a solid minute alone with Ashton before he asks: “You know anything about Mum?”

Ashton raises his eyebrows to Michael, still chewing on what he’s got in his mouth. He looks a lot younger like this, not more than three or four years between them, early twenties tops, long hair, but not as long as Dylan’s, combed back and still wet. His eyes are something between hazel and green, and he’s got a bit of stubble, but it somehow acts in reverse of what it should, only making him look more boyish. He sighs and shrugs, and Michael looks away, ahead at the desert that unfolds indefinitely in front of them.

“Just thought you would,” Michael explains, because he feels like he needs to say something.

“I mean,” Ashton tells him, like that says everything. And then he shakes his head. “Sorry, man. What I know is what someone must’ve told you already. Karen Gordon is out of the Council. Dylan may know a bit more, but we never discussed her in detail. There was always something more… urgent,” he shrugs, and starts chewing on his bottom lip instead.

Michael brings him back to reality by clearing his throat. “Wait, why? Why does Dylan know more?”

“Eki Brown,” he spits the words out in a way that makes Michael cock an eyebrow, so Ashton sighs, throws another chip in his mouth, and speaks with his mouth full. “Dylan and Eki are dating. That’s how he ends up knowing most stuff, and so does all of Chaos. Her Dad is in the Council.”

“I know who her father is,” Michael says, slowly. “Are you telling me someone in the Council is working with Chaos? That Brown is? And so is his daughter, apparently.”

Ashton turns to look at him, like he’s dumbfounded. And then he laughs, properly laughs, shoulders jerking up a bit as he shakes his head. Michael just stares at him, until it stops, and then Ashton says: “God, for a future Chaos leader, you’re naive as fuck, aren’t you?” he pats Michael’s shoulder fondly, and Michael jerks back with an offended frown that the doesn’t fully mean. Ashton scoots closer, bumps his shoulder to Michael’s. “Eki doesn’t know about Dylan, dummy.”

Michael parts his lips, and then he closes his mouth again.

He takes a deep breath, and tries to push away the thoughts. Because he does think it’s sad, everything in this is, and he hadn’t thought about the people they’d lie to, just sort of figured that people like Dylan and Ashton made no real bounds with anyone in Order if they were working with Chaos, and that’s it. Nobody would be seriously hurt in the process. Not in the way that matters most. Sure bullets can kill, but then you’re gone, and can’t think about being betrayed.

Michael never felt any special way for Eki, but he feels bad for her now.

Her boyfriend is a spy telling on her family and her society to the people lurking in the shadows. The guy she loves and kisses and tells her she’s beautiful is the same who’s going to fight her when the time comes. Who, in a way, is already fighting her. The war’s been going on for a while.

“Do you think he at least cares for her a little?” Michael asks, quietly.

Ashton stops, gives him a long look.

And he wishes he could make Ashton understand how important it is for him that Dylan cares for Eki. That he’s not just playing a game and his heart plays no role in it either, that she’s disposable. He wishes he could find a way to tell Ashton exactly how much he needs it to be true, so he can keep going, and eventually be face-to-face with Daryl, and not falter, because he knows that people are still people and sure Dylan has to betray Eki on a daily basis, but he feels bad about it.

He doesn’t even need Dylan to love her. Just care about her.

But the way Ashton looks at him, it makes Michael feel so inappropriate.

That’s sort of why he wishes he could explain, but the words don’t connect well enough for eloquence. When he parts his lips, all that he can manage is a little stutter as Ashton’s frown grows a little more serious, a little more hurt.

“Why would you ask me that?” 

Michael breathes in, and holds his breath. He shakes his head, says, “Forget it,” and then, because Ashton looks away like he’s been wounded, Michael adds: “I wanted to thank you before, just didn’t get around it. So thank you.”

“What for,” he asks, though he doesn’t sound very interested.

“Well, two things, actually,” Michael starts, and clears his throat again, as if that helps. It doesn’t, not particularly. “What you did for Luke back there, making sure nobody else knew… I don’t think he understands it yet. He’s only freaked out about how it affects the people closer to him. It doesn’t seem to have clicked for him that the moment more people realize that the drug worked and he’s got fabricated magick in him, they’re going to want to replicate that. Order, definitely, humans, too, but maybe Chaos as well,” he trails off, not sure how Ashton will take it. But Ashton just nods, looking like he’d rather not talk about it, but needs to, as well. Michael understands.

“They’ll open him up again,” Ashton says, with some casualty to it, like it’s inevitable. 

Michael clears his throat again, to try and make himself less uncomfortable with this conversation. “It won’t happen, because nobody knows. You two got rid of everyone else who saw what The Trinity had to show you, didn’t you?”

Ashton still isn’t looking at him, but he nods, says, “Killed them all.”

 _Getting rid_ sounds like they got fired or were suddenly excluded from a group of friends. Like a wife getting a divorce or a child cutting off an abusive parent from their life. But Ashton’s words make it all the more real, and so Michael takes a deep breath, tries to ignore that just like Ashton, those guards had people who cared for them, too, and says: “So he’s safe for now. And it takes me to my next point: that guy you killed… The first. When the elevator got to the ninth floor and a new team came, and your eyes turned back and your body changed, and you went for his throat.” 

Turning to look at him finally, Ashton has a funny look on his face, tentative and cautious, like he may be afraid of what he’s done. And it’s not quite what Michael expected, so he frowns a bit at him. Ashton encourages him to go on, with a soft: “Yeah?”

“He was the one who arrested me. That guy tortured me for six months.”

Ashton parts his lips, blinks a couple of times. “Shit, Michael, I didn’t know,” he starts, and then, closes his eyes, shaking his head, breathing out heavily. He starts to talk and then stops himself, tries again and what comes out is: “I shouldn’t have.”

Michael tilts his head to the side. “You shouldn’t have? I’m thanking you for killing him. It makes me feel like shit, actually fucking terrified, but I _enjoyed_ watching you kill him. I thought he deserved it. And maybe he did, but maybe all of us do too. But anyway, I just… I thought I’d thank you. To my eyes, he didn’t get to live.”

Like to the eyes of the family and friends of the people they killed, they probably don’t get to live. Michael’s killed. There are people out there who’ll cherish his death so fucking much when it comes. It makes his head a little dizzy, so he forces the thought of his head, and clears his throat, because Ashton’s giving him a funny look again, like he doesn’t understand where Michael’s coming from, and he thought maybe he would, coming from Order and Order all around, but he doesn’t. Nobody in her gets Michael, and he doesn’t get them, either.

“It was your kill,” he says, simply.

Snorting, he raises his eyebrows. “Ashton, no.”

Ashton doesn’t seem like he understands what he means at all, but he accepts it, and nods, and they smile at each other very briefly, a tiny little bit of peace going between them like they’ve earned it somehow. 

It isn’t long before the other three come to meet them, bags full of things in their arms. Ashton and Michael help them, they decide on who’s driving for the next few hours -- Halsey -- and then Luke waits for Ashton to get in the car, gets between the door and Michael, and tells him, with a worried look:

“I told them to wait. I opened the closet and told them to not move. And then I told them to look at the clock for an hour, and only then talk and move and leave the closet. I’m not sure it worked at all, but. But I tried.” 

Michael feels his lips shape into a small smile, and he holds the side of Luke’s face, feeling his chest swell. He’s so fucking scared anyone finds out. He’s so fucking scared of losing him. And he feels his eyes well up a bit at that, but instead of saying that, he says: “It worked. You’re figuring out how to make it work.”

Luke’s smile back comes out sheepish, with a shrug and rolling eyes, and Michael rubs the back of his neck with a proud and quiet smile, before Luke gets in the jeep and and Michael just after him.

There’s no radio in the car, but Halsey starts singing before she turns the key in the ignition. It’s a song about war, that talks about survival more than killing. Everyone except Michael knows the lyrics to it, so one by one, they join her, and before they’re past the first few miles, they’re already singing at the top of their lungs, and smiling and laughing at exaggerated tones of voices, and though Michael doesn’t know where he fits in all that, he’s sure he fits in anyway.


	14. in this wild wicked world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eeeeeeeeeeee!!! *w* thank you so much for taking the time to leave comments if you do; it just makes me rly rly rly happy? i don't know. today i decided to reread all the comments left in this fic and i started feeling something really warm in my chest. i think it's love. thank you for your support.
> 
> eta: just realized we reached 100k, guys. this is beautiful. i can't thank you enough for following me in this crazy adventure.

Ashton managed to keep quiet sitting on Luke’s other side for approximately twenty minutes before he started stripping out of his clothes. Michael just stared, wide-eyed, looking from Luke to Ashton, trying to get some sort of explanation, but Luke looked too sleepy, with his arm draped around Michael’s shoulder and his eyes focused out the window, and Ashton wouldn’t look back at Michael, too busy struggling to get out of his shirt.

Michael clears his throat, because of all the weird things that have happened, he’s sure Ashton raising his hips to get out of his pants shouldn’t surprise him, but it still makes him search for everyone’s attention, like he’s afraid he might be hallucinating.

Halsey’s eyes are on the road, just distracted enough that she has one elbow out the window.

Geordie finally looks over her shoulder, in time to see Ashton completely naked. Michael feels his cheeks heating up immediately, but Luke’s still absolutely unfazed, and Geordie doesn’t seem embarrassed, either, so he says nothing, just bites the insides of his cheeks with a frown.

“My lap?” she offers, nonchalant.

Michael stares.

Ashton says, “Sure, but make sure Halsey won’t poke me or throw any water at me,” he says, and he sounds serious, but there’s a hint of mockery in his eyes that makes Geordie snort and roll her eyes. Michael turns to Ashton with an inquisitive look, about to question the madness in all that.

Then he blinks, and his eyes are all white.

It’s different, watching it now and what it was when it was a life or death situation. When the opaque whiteness fill the entirety of his eyes, his shoulders jerk forward instead of backwards, and it doesn’t look like all the bones in his body are breaking, but shrinking. When his shoulders come so close they almost touch, inhumane and bizarre, his head jerks back slowly, almost carefully, and there’s no noise of broken bones, just weird smoothness. 

Michael must be staring too much, jaw dropped and no proper reaction, because between him and Ashton, Luke chuckles quietly, and with his thumb and index finger, he closes Michael’s mouth. Michael turns to him with a half-smile, snorting, and it’s just. Luke smiles at him like he’s so endeared, like Ashton taking his clothes off and turning into a feline is the most normal thing they could ever see happening, and Michael’s so _endearing_ for being equal parts impressed and horrified.

Though it does make him smile that Luke looks at him like that. He’s just happy for the attention, the eyes on his, the hand still on his chin. So he touches Luke’s chest and then up his neck to direct Luke to him, and presses his lips to Luke’s.

At first, Luke kisses him back, soft and gentle and _good_. And then he pulls away, with wide eyes and parted lips, like he means to apologize. Michael stares at him, and Luke doesn’t have to say anything for Michael to get that Luke probably wanted to kiss him. But he doesn’t say it’s got nothing to do with mind control, and more with Luke’s hands on him. Instead he takes a deep breath and gives Luke the space he needs, and turns to Ashton.

Focusing on Luke made him lose half the show. Ashton’s turned into a cat, small and black, and he wastes no time looking at either Michael or Luke before he walks to the front seats with his tail shooting up, amused. Geordie’s got a silly smile on her lips as she takes the cat with both hands, settles him in her lap.

Michael blinks slowly, and then a couple of times faster, moving forward, one arm bracing around Geordie’s seat so he can look. He rests his face against the neck rest, watching Geordie pet Ashton’s black fur until he purrs to her touch, all white eyes closed, but magick not gone.

“I couldn’t think of keeping magick going for so long,” Michael says, to anyone who’ll contribute with that. 

Geordie’s too busy with Ashton, and Luke’s sitting back with more space for them, his hand rubbing the small of Michael’s back absentmindedly, so it’s Halsey, with her eyes still ahead on the road, who tells him: “It’s different with shapeshifters. Some are stuck with their other forms forever. You’ll meet a girl, when we get to the city. Her magick is sort of a consequence to the change in her body. That happens more with us than with Order.”

He looks at her, born Order, white spreading over her eyes when she calls her magick, and yet so insistent in calling herself Chaos. He supposes it’s the same with all of them, Ashton also being Order, Geordie being human. He sort of wants to ask, but doesn’t want to break the spell they’re all in, the sun setting all pink and orange in the sky, Halsey squinting against it as she keeps her eyes on the windshield, everyone a little sleepy and a little content, at least in knowing that so far, they’re all still alive.

So instead he says: “Why’s that?”

Halsey shrugs, but she still doesn’t seem hostile. “Chaos and Order are social and not biologic dividers. I guess the more fucked up you get, the more unlikely you are to be accepted in Order. Born with retractable wings? Fierce, that’s obviously Order. But born with thin snake fangs that won’t go away no matter how much you try? That’s disgusting, Chaos, no second thoughts.”

Michael considers this. He never knew anyone could be born with snake fangs.

But he frowns, the part of him that was raised on the other side of all this trying to reason with all new that he’s learned. “But you can’t argue with the colors in the eyes. That’s not social. That’s innate.”

“Say you're born with light eyes, green or blue,” Halsey shrugs, and Michael nods, following. “Your eyes are more likely to hurt a bit in the sun, but you can still see the same as someone with a darker eye color, isn’t that right?” she pauses. Before Michael can say a thing, she adds: “And either you or the one with brown eyes having eyesight problems has more to do with genetics than the color of your eye. Both of you can have myopia or something.”

Michael smiles. 

“You’re saying that Order and Chaos _are_ strictly social differentiations, even if biology plays an initial role that just sets them apart. Like with the eye colors. Being good or bad is like having an eyesight problem. It’s not about the color of your eyes,” he concludes.

Geordie and Luke are both quiet, but Halsey gives him a small smile through the rearview mirror, and it’s sort of like that something goes between them, a deeper understanding, something that makes him relax a bit more under Luke’s touch, and Halsey’s knuckles around the steering wheel aren’t white anymore.

He presses his lips together, and sighs, contently, too.

Michael turns to Luke, and asks, in a voice low and quiet: “Can we cuddle?”

Luke raises his eyebrows, as if surprised, but a shy smile comes over his lips, and he nods.

It’s sort of funny, he thinks, how dazed he feels sometimes, like the past few weeks and months all happened in the past twenty four hours, sometimes the last ten years. He’s not sure how come exactly that the sequence of life and death situations have taken him to a point where he’s absolutely comfortable in sharing the backseat of an enormous beat jeep, with a shape-shifter sprawled awkwardly on the lap of an assassin human, an Order-born Chaos witch who actually cares for his father driving them all towards what they call home. In the backseat, the boy with the maniac smile, the goggles, the blow-torch and the scars over his chest -- more recently, also the mind control fabricated magick -- lies down and pulls him closer, so they’re both lying on the backseat. The road isn’t bumpy, it’s peaceful enough that it seems alright to lie down and yawn, pulling Luke’s hand over his stomach absentmindedly.

There was a time when he felt too self-conscious of his body to be touched like that.

Now, self-consciousness is hard to remember. Sometimes, even self-awareness is.

He asks: “Geordie, Halsey. Do you guys have like, a nail clipper?”

Halsey snorts, and with a funny tone, she asks: “What?!”

Apparently not that judgmental, Geordie nods, without taking her hands off Ashton’s fur. “In my bag under your seat. It’s in a pink smaller bag, you’ll find it easily.”

“It’s a vanity kit, not a smaller bag,” Halsey says in a lower tone, glaring at Geordie.

Geordie stares at her, dumbfounded.

And as Michael starts to sit, Luke’s hand pauses on his thigh, and he snorts out loud, getting Michael’s attention and raised eyebrows. “You do know I can alter anything made of metal, right? That I could’ve gotten you a nail clipper the first day if you’d asked.”

He looks almost offended. Michael thinks it’s sort of entertaining. 

Amused, he raises his eyebrows. “Didn’t know if you could do it, to be honest,” he smirks.

Luke stops his hand immediately, and then retrieves it. Holding eye-contact with Michael as Michael keeps shooting him that full-of-shit smirk, Luke narrows his eyes, and his hand comes back in a slap across Michael’s thigh. Michael laughs until he’s throwing his head back, dropping his weight on Luke’s middle. Instead of wrapping his arms around him and pulling him down properly, Luke just crosses his arms with a crossed look, huffing when Michael keeps his smile, looking down at him.

“You’re a dick,” Luke says, but he’s biting back a smirk, too.

Michael shakes his head. “I’m concerned about magick competence,” he leans back, not to be annoying this time, hand sliding over Luke’s frame until he stops on his waist, watching Luke roll his eyes with a small smile, until his smile spreads.

“You two are disgusting,” Halsey contributes, looking at them through the rearview mirror.

Her contribution is ignored.

“You’re concerned about being a dick,” Luke raises his eyebrows, but he’s actually smiling now, and Michael mirrors his smile, raising his shoulders to shrug.

“You love me.”

He still says it in that playful, ridiculously smug tone of voice, but the second it’s out, his smile falters and he parts his lips. Luke blinks a couple of time, says, “Um,” and clears his throat. Geordie snorts, loud enough that Michael can make turn to look at her and get a few seconds. He doesn’t find her looking back, but finds Halsey’s eyes on them again through the rearview mirror. She’s shaking her head.

“I mean,” Michael starts, and retrieves his hand from Luke’s waist.

Luke doesn’t pull himself to sit like Michael’s sitting, so Michael’s pretty much just sitting with his back against Luke’s legs now, which he’d like to stop, if anything because he can’t look anywhere that isn’t Luke right now, and he really doesn’t want to.

“Um,” Luke repeats.

Michael shuts his eyes, and takes a deep breath. 

Ignoring the burning on his cheeks, he frowns and asks, loud enough to muffle Halsey’s chuckle: “Nail clipper. Which bag is yours?”

* * *

It’s mostly uneventful, though, like they’re going to the beach a couple of hours away and there’s nothing wrong or suspicious, and nobody tenses with the passing cars. The view out the window changes with time; they leave the desert fast, and the timid trees start becoming more and more frequent until there are woods to both sides of the road, plus the eventual house or gas station. There aren’t many, though, not for the longest time, and when Michael sees the first bridge in the distance, he thinks of asking how far from the capital they are, but figures there’s no point.

He’s never really traveled much, never really known how long he can keep his eyes closed with the bumpy road or whether he can live on snacks for lots of hours in a row. There was just the village, and then once, moving out. The city had welcomed him so much that he never felt much like leaving, or at least Karen had never encouraged him to leave. They were city people, then, after being born in the village.

Karen used to talk about being a child in the village, absolutely in love with the husband who Michael thought was his father for the first half of his life. And it makes him question it, quietly and with a frown, lying down in the back of the jeep with Luke behind him, if Karen ever loved John. If she ever loved Daryl. What was the story before he was born, and how come she kept it to herself.

It’s dark again, but Geordie had said, right before she stopped saying anything, that it wasn’t that late. Michael doesn’t know why he did it, rolled his eyes back and called his Order, but he did it anyway. He felt it in his veins, the peaceful way in which Geordie’s hand kept on top of Ashton’s small cat body, as she fell asleep, trusting of the people around her, but with something keeping her just restless enough that it reminded Michael not to relax himself. Halsey was getting tired, he could feel it, the way she breathed with more sighing than not, how she distracted herself a bit too much for someone who was driving. He couldn’t connect to Ashton, not like this, so he stopped trying. Instead he focused back on Luke, and he felt his heart beating a bit faster.

It’s a combination of Luke’s fingers writing things that Michael doesn’t know on his back, fingers sliding up and down his spine over the fabric of his stolen shirt, and they’re not exactly cuddling anymore, aren’t even touching other than for Luke’s fingers, but it feels so big, just this small thing, and Luke’s breathing rhythm, so much different than Geordie. There’s no restlessness to it, like he’s genuinely happy. Like he’s genuinely safe.

It makes his heart beat faster, because they’re not safe anywhere. But Michael still likes that Luke feels safe with him. 

He blinks his eyes back, and asks, quietly: “Did Ashton ever tell you what is it that he saw?”

The question seems to throw Luke a little. His fingers stop and Michael doesn’t need to feel the world enhanced to catch the hesitance, the discomfort. He keeps his voice low, but it’s mostly for Geordie and Ashton’s benefit, both asleep. He doesn’t mind that Halsey listens, even if she pretends she doesn’t. Mostly, he just cares for Luke’s reticent silence, and how he takes a deep breath before talking.

“No. I didn’t want to know. He started telling me, but it didn’t feel right to know. The important part is that the drug worked, and I need to learn how to deal with that, but I don’t want to know what is it that I do with it that Ashton saw happen.”

Michael considers telling Luke about the prophecy he saw, too, but sees no point in it.

The thing about prophecies is that they’re supposed to be so life-changing. The one Ashton and the other guards saw, showed them that the humans had finally found a way to fabricate magick, and one so dark and twisted that was never natural to any witch: mind control. Years before, someone had seen Luke find Daryl’s son and break him out of prison. It served to save two children from starvation and the misery of war, and point Daryl in the right direction to claim his son to Chaos. And then there was the one nobody talked about, but apparently everyone knew: Michael taking charge for Chaos, being their leader, taking that position from Daryl.

There’s nothing especially world shattering about finding out for sure that he and Calum would never mend their friendship, what was once the most important thing in Michael’s life.

He still wonders why The Trinity had to show that to someone, though. It doesn’t make sense.

“Halsey’s tired. You should drive a bit,” he says. 

Michael’s sort of expecting her to protest, tell him to mind his own business, even if in a playful tone, but she doesn’t. She just sighs again, and keeps her eyes ahead. Luke lets out an agreeing sound before he’s touching Michael’s waist to sit up, and Michael curls lazily into a ball to give Luke some room. He rubs his eyes, yawning, and Luke gives him a brief look before he’s wrapping his arm around the driver’s seat, hand stopping on Halsey’s shoulder.

“Pull over. We’re close.”

She sighs, but doesn’t slow down.

“Halsey,” Luke tries again. 

Michael lies back, sprawled and unbothered, throwing his feet on Luke’s lap. Luke keeps one of his hands on Halsey’s shoulder, but the other comes to rest on top of one of Michael’s ankles. He rubs a bit absentmindedly, like his hands have taken a life of their own, even if his mind is set on talking to Halsey. Michael smiles a bit at that.

“Are you prepared for coming home?” she asks him.

He chuckles lowly. “Are you?”

Michael breathes out heavily, and tries to blink away the sleepiness that starts gnawing at him. Luke’s hand is so heavy and careful against his skin, and there’s no noise at all, no other than the engine and their breathing, and even then, that’s a lullaby. Nothing’s more beautiful than breathing. 

“What did he say,” Luke asks, but he doesn’t sound all that curious, and Michael needs to frown and think a bit before he understands what Luke’s talking about, where’s the hesitation coming from. Because Halsey doesn’t say anything, Luke adds: “What did he say, when he told you to kill me?”

It makes Michael freeze, suddenly alert, and he hates it.

He hates just thinking about it.

He hates everything and he hates most how long it takes for Halsey to say something.

“Said if you messed with his boy’s head, I should put a bullet in yours,” she says.

Luke nods. “Sounds like you should’ve put a bullet in my head, then.”

They’re quiet for a second, and Michael doesn’t know what that’s like, Luke’s hand still on her shoulder, Halsey’s eyes still on the dark road ahead. It makes him press his lips together to stop himself from interrupting, because it feels like the type of conversation that shouldn’t be interrupted. But then Luke parts his lips to say something and stops himself, and he squeezes Michael’s ankle in a way that makes Michael’s heart sink, so he sends all restrictions to hell, and says:

“So Daryl didn’t think Luke could like me, and you didn’t think I could like Luke, huh,” he raises his eyebrows. Luke gives him a curious look, and Michael tilts his head. “We keep proving people wrong. We’re just that good.”

Luke smiles, that beautiful and trustworthy smile that makes Michael mirror it right back at him as a knee-jerk reaction. Halsey chuckles, and she sounds more amused than annoyed, so Michael keeps to himself the little visit she paid him before it was Order who paid them all a visit in the motel. He keeps the threats and the lamp iron around his throat to himself. He keeps it all quiet, because it doesn’t matter anymore. 

“He’s not going to hurt you, okay?” Michael says, and then he takes a deep breath, filled with self-importance and high hopes: “He didn’t go through all this trouble to lock me up, did he? He wants something from me. And I’ll only cooperate if he’s not putting bullets in anyone’s heads. Daryl won’t hurt any of you.”

The type of look Luke gives him then does make him feel naive and small. It’s a little reassuring look, like, _sure_ Michael has that power, and Halsey doesn’t even offer him that much. She just pulls over, and then she’s sighing heavily and taking off her seatbelt, and giving Luke directions Michael only half pays attention to, and he doesn’t bother to stand up to stretch his legs or anything. He just scoots over to the side a bit so Halsey can come in, and when she takes a pillow from under the backseat, Michael remembers his blanket.

Luke gives them both a look through the rearview mirror before he starts driving.

Michael doesn’t know what to say to make it all okay, so he sits cross-legged and looks back at him through the reflection, until eventually his shoulders feel too heavy and Luke turns the key in the ignition again.

“It’s going to be fine,” he half-states, half-asks, and they all give him silence in response.

* * *

There are some things Michael will never forget, and then there are others he forgets on spot.

It isn’t true that he never left the city after Karen and he moved. He went on a road trip with Calum’s family once, when he was fifteen and bored out of his mind, Karen was with David Hood in a congress across the country, and Joy Hood decided they should go to their lake house.

Mali-koa invited her boyfriend at the time, who ended up not showing, and Calum invited Michael.

That was before Maddy, too.

Mali-koa kept her mouth shut for most of the trip, about two hours of riding in a perfectly cemented road with not much to watch out the windows if not other cars, so Calum and Michael played dare with each other -- like Michael had to stuff his mouth with two cupcakes if a white car didn’t pass them, or that Calum had to drink all the water from the bottle in one go if they didn’t see a red car for ten seconds -- to keep themselves busy. Joy kept trying to talk to Mali, but Michael didn’t really want to pay attention to it any more than Calum did.

Joy said, at one point: “He’s not good husband material anyway.”

Mali-koa didn’t reply.

“What _is_ that stupid ponytail, anyway? Plus, he’s headed to be your superior. Things could get quite awkward, and you wouldn’t want a relationship getting in the way of your career,” Joy raised her eyebrows, too. Michael looked away when Joy noticed him looking through the rearview mirror.

Mali-koa didn’t reply.

“And Mali, my dear, he doesn’t have the brains, anyway. In a few years, you’ll have an excellent team, and he’ll be probably somewhere in the prison torturing prisoners to get information out of them.”

At this, Mali-koa did reply. She glared at Joy, gave Calum and Michael a look, just to see if they were paying attention. They sort of were, sort of weren’t, Calum’s eyes squinted to see if he could find a yellow car, the ultimate challenge, or otherwise he’d have to somehow not pee in their next stop, just when they reached the lake house. 

“Mother,” Mali-koa said, alarmingly, and Joy just sighed.

“They weren’t paying attention,” she said, instead of I’m sorry.

Michael sort of wasn’t, trying to find the yellow car too, but even being only fifteen, he knew nobody who worked for the Order was supposed to torture anyone. But he was only half paying attention to the conversation anyway, and figured he must’ve heard something wrong.

“Time’s up,” he told Calum, bumping his shoulder to his. “And you’re so fucked.”

Calum dropped his head back with widened eyes. “I just chugged down all that water,” he whines, pointing at the plastic bottle on the floor of the car. “You’re the worst friend in the world,” Calum states, matter-of-factly, but Michael just rolls his eyes exaggeratedly, and slaps the back of Calum’s head.

“Big baby,” is his response.

Mali-koa gives him a look, looking over her shoulder suddenly.

At first, he thinks she’s mad that he’s hit Calum. He’s about to explain that they do this all the time, that this doesn’t really hurt, that Calum’s probably kicked him way more than Michael ever has the speed to catch Calum. But it’s not it. She’s frowning and looking at him, and then she asks:

“What’s your magick again, Michael?”

Michael stutters. It’s not polite to ask.

“I can feel things in an enhanced way,” he says, lamely, and looks away from her, because she’s older and stronger, and has that grown-up look about her. “It’s not that cool.”

But she keeps looking at him with a frown, and then like something clicks, she turns to Calum, her expression easing into a small smile, and says: “Cal’s still trying to figure out how to make his magick work. If you’ve got yours figured out, maybe you could help him.”

Then it’s later, much later, when they’ve stopped at a gas station and Mali-koa and Joy are both talking with someone who wants a picture with Joy Hood, because she’s in the Council and such an example of what a modern witch should be, and Michael and Calum are both sitting on the low gates nearby, legs hanging and hands scraping a bit where they’re touching the old cement of the walls already half destroyed and back to the ground.

“Do you think about war sometimes?” Calum asks.

Michael takes a deep breath, and because Calum doesn’t know anything about the truth, he nods. “That’s why I flunked History last year, you know that? Couldn’t stand to just sit there and listen to all the shit Chaos put us through. It was too much. They killed too many. It’s like watching horror movies, but you know it’s all true.”

Calum’s quiet for a second.

Even though Calum doesn’t know the extension of his hatred, that grows all the way to the mirror, Michael sort of thinks maybe Calum knows what he means, just for how he doesn’t say anything right away. It wasn’t difficult to see how anything related to the Magick War made Michael uncomfortable and fidgety, but he always said that he was like that with death. Couldn’t see anyone bleeding, he told all of his teachers, because he’d just pass out. That granted some comprehensive looks and pats on the back as his teachers didn’t take it personally when there were lots of slides with Order bodies sprawled in awkward angles, killed in the wake of the Magick War. But he still failed History.

“We need to know, though,” Calum says, eventually. “It’s brutal and it hurts to think about, but it’s our history, isn’t it? After the Badlands when we lived in the shadows, too afraid of what humans would do if they knew, and then Order and Chaos came together to battle against humanity, find their rightful place. But Chaos is too greedy and evil, and wanted to eliminate Order _once and for all_ ,” he says the last words in a funny way, imitating their History teacher’s tone of voice, but even though Michael chuckles lowly, the seriousness of what Calum’s saying doesn’t go by unnoticed. “I don’t know, I just-- I think about what I’d do if I’d been born ten years earlier. What I’d do if I fought in the War.”

Michael sighs and looks ahead. He wonders how long until they finally reach where they’re going.

“What’s your lake house like?” Michael asks, but his heart’s not in it.

He’s thinking about where they’re going in a broader way.

“Do you think I could make a difference?” Calum asks him, with his eyebrows raised and sounding older than he really is. Michael gives him a look, stops himself from saying: _Because it’s clear that my shitty power wouldn’t make a difference, right?_ and instead just shrugs. Calum sighs. “Being a healer is supposed to be more powerful than this. Last night, Mali had a papercut, and came to me so I could practice. I couldn’t do anything. Imagine if we were at war. I’d be the most useless healer in all Order.”

His best friend frowns, frustrated.

And because Michael loves him, he stares down at the cemented wall and at his hands, and slaps his hand hard against the ugly nailheads sneaking out of the faded concrete. It hurts, jolts of pain going up his arm, but he does it again and again until Calum’s hands stop his arm, with terrified wide eyes and parted lips.

Michael gives him a tiny smile, and offers Calum his hand.

For a second that stretches for too long, Michael thinks it was a stupid idea.

Calum still looks a little horrified at Michael, and won’t take his hand. It’s too overwhelming, to offer his hand with his heart on his sleeve, an open expression and raised eyebrows that tell Calum: _take it_. Plus, and more obviously, it hurts. His palm is all scraped, blood forming where it was hit with the nails, little dots splintering his hand colorful. It shoots electricity up his arm, makes his palm a little dormant, and he can’t bare to keep looking at Calum, so he looks away. But his palm is still facing up in his direction, the offer still standing.

Taking a deep, deep breath, Calum’s shaky hands touch the back of his, and when their eyes connect again, Calum looks scared. It makes him uncomfortable, because Michael doesn’t know whether Calum’s scared of failing in his magick again, or just scared of Michael.

He doesn’t quite understand the latter thought, but he still sees it as possible. It’s odd.

“You can do it,” he says, for encouragement, instead of hissing, because it’s starting to burn a bit.

Calum presses his lips together, looking from Michael to his hand, and even though Calum’s skin is darker than his, his hands seem to pale in comparison, which is strange. They’re shaking so much, Michael’s convinced it was a bad idea -- contrary to what he’s just said, Calum can’t do it. If he couldn’t help with Mali-koa’s papercut, he’s certainly no use with this.

But he wanted to believe in him. To help him.

And then, Calum blinks his eyes back. They’re all-white, like he’s never seen Michael do, because Michael’s eyes don’t go opaque like this. Calum’s frown grows deeper, and Michael forgets about the pain momentarily, just watching the whiteness in Calum’s eyes like he’s not allowed to stare at Karen’s when she’s controlling water for whatever reason. Michael’s so jealous of that, of being able to turn his eyes to one color all the way, that he thinks that even if Calum doesn’t make a very good healer, his magick can still be just his eyes.

His fingers dig at the skin of Michael’s wrist, and it hurts like hell, properly hurts in a way that could make him scream if it wasn’t so weirdly balanced -- the pain quickly arising and fading with Calum’s fingertips pressed to his wrist, and the pain on his palm coming to an abrupt stop.

Michael does hiss this time, staring down, and he watches the wounds in his palm close. One by one, they close, and the blood on his skin barely feels like his own. He’s smiling quietly, a sense of pride washing over him, and Calum’s almost all the way done, when he hears a gasp behind them.

“What were you _thinking_ ,” Mali-koa yells, and then she shoves Michael away.

He almost loses balance, has to grab at the low wall too tightly, but if anything, it helps him see that he feels no pain at all. He’s frowning, staring up at her with an offended expression. There’s something close to panic in her eyes, though, as she touches Calum’s shoulders, squeezes, calls out his name. Calum opens his eyes slowly, and he looks numb, like he’s been drugged.

He blinks slowly, and she touches the side of his head. “Mum! Come over here!” she yells louder this time, but without looking away from Calum. With one hand touching his face, her other hand goes to his right wrist, then the other. Both of his palms are dotted with droplets of blood, starting from new formed wounds.

Michael takes a deep breath, staring.

Joy comes running, and once she sees the paleness in Calum’s face, she reaches to him immediately. Mali-koa lets him go so Joy can take him, and turns to Michael. “You’re not right in the head,” she says, but it sounds like a curse instead. 

With a frown and apologetic eyes, he tells her: “You said I should help. I was trying to.”

She snorts, and shakes her head in distrust, or disgust, or dis-something.

Calum gets tiny scars all over both his palms. 

They’re Michael’s gift that will never fade.

* * *

Michael wakes up with a start.

The memory is bad enough, but it’s not just the memory. It’s the memory that comes like something that he should’ve seen coming but doesn’t, like a bullet fired from a gun or a dart cutting air to hit him. He doesn’t stop it in time, and then he’s gasping as he snaps his eyes open, filling his lungs with air. 

In one of his ears, the man he killed with a bullet whispers that he should’ve known better. _Not right in the head_. In his other ear, the man he killed with his Chaos magick whispers that he’s not good enough to fight this fight. _What were you thinking?_

“You alright?”

Luke’s voice is quiet but thick, or just strong enough to snap him out of his trance, too. He blinks slowly, nods his head, notices the solid weight on his shoulder when he tries moving forward. Halsey sleeps soundly next to him, and that alone calms his heart a little. It’s dumb, he knows, but it makes him take a deep breath, properly so.

He wonders if Luke told him to breathe in his head.

Michael’s sure he should care, but he can’t bring himself to.

Luke’s still watching him quietly, eyes flicking between the rearview mirror and the windshield. “Bad dream,” he explains, voice quiet and low, and slowly, cautiously, he moves his arm so it’s around Halsey’s shoulder, so her head is pressed against his chest instead, in a better angle for both of them. She doesn’t wake up, but she frowns and moves a bit, and he rubs her shoulder, looking down at her, but still talking to Luke. “Are we still far?”

“Not really,” Luke tells him with a quiet sigh. “We have about two hours before we get there.”

Michael looks ahead, tries to identify something, _anything_ , but it’s all darkness. All he can see is as much as the headlights will take them, just the road. He supposes if they could see the sky, there’d be a little bit more to be seen, but the clouds are heavy and it sort of looks like the end of the world. Michael smiles quietly at the thought, and tells himself to forget about the bad memories that came haunting him in dreams.

It is the first time he’s leaving the city, he tells himself, because it’s the first one that will count.

“Can you tell me about it?”

Luke lets out a humming noise of agreement almost immediately. Michael holds his breath, waits for Luke to connect his thoughts, and the wait is brief, but still unnerving. It makes him wish he had thought of a better and more specific question, like: _Will Daryl actually want to kill you when we get there?_ “We call it Death Valley.”

Michael nods. “Like the desert?”

Luke frowns, looking at him through the mirror. “What?” 

Then he remembers Luke didn’t really go to school much, and smiles quietly, shaking his head lightly. “Never mind. It’s not important. Why do you call it Death Valley?”

There’s a certain wickedness to Luke’s smile then that makes Michael smile back. “Because we should all be dead,” he answers, simply. Michael smirks, the answer giving him an impossible thrill. He’s supposed to be dead, too, or at least according to Dylan. He snorts, and that’s enough encouragement for Luke to go on. “Death Valley isn’t a desert, though, don’t know where you got that idea from,” he pauses, and Michael chuckles, so he echoes the sound. “Well, it isn’t much of anything. The city is underground, goes for as long as it can. At least a thousand of us live in Death Valley and up.”

In the city, there are six millions of them, all Order. 

Or mostly Order, and some born-Order but actually Chaos, or some Chaos undercover, plus humans. But still, the difference seems crushing. The pride Luke takes in saying there’s at least a thousand of them in Death Valley make Michael feel sad. He kicks the thought aside, though, and chooses to focus on something else. “And up?” 

Luke nods. “It’s underground, right? So that’s where our homes are, and sometimes, when there are people willing, where we learn things. Some people can’t really leave ever, others do. On missions of different kinds. We can’t really _make_ much food, so we have agreements with humans, usually. Humans can have deals with us, but we never negotiate with Order.” He pauses, definite and firm. “With humans, it isn’t that different than it is with us. They’re not as marginalized, I guess, because they’re seen as less than Order, less than witches, but still not as born evil. So it’s, like, you know where I’m going with this, right? Humans can hang around if they want. They rarely live in Death Valley, but sometimes they live up. Some of us, the ones who are good with things like construction and have magick related to that -- or are, you know, just really good at this stuff -- build houses and stuff for them up. It’s not Death Valley, but they can come down if they want. They just rarely do. I don’t think anyone who isn’t Chaos would really call Death Valley home unless nowhere else would take them.”

And something, small and exciting, starts at the pit of his stomach. He presses his lips together so hard his teeth hurts the insides of his lips, and then he clears his throat, asking: “Do you and Jack have a house in Death Valley?”

Luke opens his mouth, then closes it.

“It’s complicated,” he says, eventually.

Michael frowns, looking at him, and that excitement dies down a little. So much for his plan of staying with Luke and his brother instead of Daryl, so much for pretty much just hoping Daryl doesn’t notice he’s in the city while he gets to know Luke’s brother and hopes Jack doesn’t hate him for just existing and by default putting Luke in danger.

He parts his lips to say something, but then someone sighs, heavy and annoyed.

It doesn’t sound like Luke.

“Will you two shut the fuck up? I’m trying to sleep,” Geordie grunts.

Michael shakes his head with a small smile, but Luke actually starts an apology that Michael cuts off in the beginning. “Could you pull over a bit? Gotta piss.”

Luke nods, and Geordie grunts again.

When the car stops with the headlights on, he carefully lies Halsey down and leaves the car. First he stretches his legs, yawning and staring up to try to find the moon. No success. But it’s still a tiny bit lighter than he figured it was from inside the jeep. There are no cars passing them, and a part of him wants to ask Luke where exactly Death Valley is, but it’s the same part of him that wants to ask what day of the week it is. It’s the part that only wants to know the unimportant things.

Plus, Luke’s still inside the car, and he doesn’t want to make him leave.

So he walks away and out of the pavement, steps on dirt too late to remember he’s not wearing any shoes, and ends up staring down instead, feeling a weird sense of happiness of feeling the soles of his feet against dirt. It’s the same sort of cleansing feeling he got when he first took a shower after months in the Order Prison. He can feel nature connecting to his magick even when he won’t roll his eyes back. It makes something nice flow inside him freely, and he takes a few steps forward, eventually doing what he needs to do and, then, just stopping. He tucks himself in and rubs his hands in the back of his jeans, staring forward at the woods that start much further away in the distance, and it makes him feel a little funny.

He presses his lips together, and his mind doesn’t race, and he doesn’t feel like running.

Michael doesn’t know how long he stays there before he hears footsteps behind him, and he doesn’t worry much about them, either, until Luke’s stopping beside him, giving him a curious look.

“Perv,” Michael says, without looking at him, the shadow of a smile creeping to his lips.

Though he can’t see him or his facial expression, Michael can hear the confusion in his voice when Luke asks: “What?! Why?!”

“Said I was gonna take a piss, you came after me, see if you’d catch a glimpse of something, didn’t you,” he turns to Luke, with raised eyebrows and narrowed eyes. Luke rolls his eyes, but he laughs, and Michael likes the sound of his laugh so much. He smiles quietly, wrapping his arms around Luke’s waist. Luke lets him, one hand touching his arm carefully, the other still by his side, watching him. “I’m not wearing any shoes.”

“Sexy,” Luke notes, the same mocking tone that Michael used a second ago.

Michael smiles, wide and bright, and comes a bit closer still, just pressing his lips to Luke’s absentmindedly. And the next step is somehow natural, to leave the car with the headlights on and their friends -- allies, Michael later corrects himself in his head -- inside, and walk to the nearest tree, still far away from it that when Michael sits down, Luke looks over his shoulder once before sitting down too.

But he goes for it, sitting between Michael’s legs and touching his knees, his thighs, resting his head on Michael’s chest with a relieved little sigh that makes Michael kiss the top of his head. It’s their last bit of freedom, before Death Valley comes. Before everything with Daryl comes.

Before trial comes.

They’re quiet for a moment, and then Michael asks him: “How’s your head?”

Luke snorts, like he doesn’t get it, but Michael knows he does. It just takes him some time to make the answer true enough before he’s saying it, reaching for Michael’s hands to pull them around Luke’s shoulders. He doesn’t let go of his hands. “I don’t know if I should tell Jack about the drug. I don’t want to worry him. But I’m also happy I’ll see him. I miss him so much.” Michael smiles, rests his chin on the top of Luke’s head without putting any weight to it. Luke plays with his fingers. “I’m happy to finally be coming home, too. I hope you like it, like us. We’re not evil.”

The last sentence comes as an added hurriedly after-thought that barely connects to his speech. It makes Michael feel a little guilty for before, but instead of saying that, he opts for honesty. “I’m a bit freaked out with the prophecy thing. I don’t know what’s Daryl’s take on it.”

Luke shrugs.

“How’s your piercing?” Luke asks.

Michael chuckles lowly. “Had forgotten about it, I guess. So not bad.” He pauses, considers talking more about it, and then stops himself and stops listening to the part of himself that goes for the unimportant things. Instead he asks: “Are there a lot of Chaos outside of Death Valley, Luke?”

The simplicity of his answer, the weight of the brokenness of it, makes Michael grow quiet: “I don’t know.” 

It’s a silence Michael doesn’t dare break, so instead he tilts his head to the side and kisses Luke’s cheek. Luke turns to him with a small and quiet smile, and Michael presses his lips to the corner of his mouth this time. Luke properly turns, then, letting go of Michael’s hands so he can touch the back of Michael’s neck gently as he covers Michael’s lips with his.

From him, it’s an apologetic type of kiss.

The I’m-sorry-you’re-a-dying-breed type of kiss.

Luke’s kissing him back with a welcoming type of kiss.

The I’m-glad-you’re-the-first-of-yours type of kiss.


	15. what doesn't destroy you, leaves you broken instead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i usually am very chill about the chapter titles, even if i love all the songs they're from. but for this one, i have to say, LISTEN TO THE 5SOS COVER OF [DROWN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fencd6lyKgs) WHILE READING PLS. also also also all the lyrics are fitting i just. feelings. many feelings. (thank you so much for all the comments i got last chapter :OOO i /love/ hearing your thoughts. thank you so much, fuck.)

Riding shotgun in an enormous jeep is something Michael hadn’t really done up to this point in life, as well as firing a gun, killing people, and and using Chaos magick on purpose. But he’s okay with the first, has a little smile on his face as he watches the woods thicken around the car as it drives by them madly on. Luke drives like he looks at people when he’s about to shoot: with that crazy gleam that should probably make feel Michael feel restless, but makes him feel weirdly comfortable. 

They’re going fast, but Luke’s confident and with an elbow out and the window rolled down, glancing away as if he’s this close to commenting on seeing something interesting outside. They don’t talk much at all, Luke driving and Michael sitting by his side, but every now and then, when Luke’s going to change the gear, Michael decides to be bold, and covers Luke’s hand in his. Luke always chuckles, every single time, and at some point Michael just snorts and stops.

So after every next time Luke changes the gear, his hand pauses on Michael’s knee, and he sort of likes that a lot more, but says nothing, either. Instead he keeps his eyes out of the window, rolled up, but still. He’s never been so deep in a forest before, like he’s never been to gas stations when he was covered in blood, and never been to cheap motels where he stayed for weeks and feeling from bad to good to bad again. 

Behind them, Ashton’s back to his human form, bothered with a pair of sweatpants but not anything else. He’s pressed against the window, one arm around Halsey, her face half-buried in his chest, her arm draped around him loosely, and Geordie’s arms around her middle, using her hips as a pillow. Michael bites back a smile, looking at them over his shoulder, before sighing and looking ahead. It’s in time to see what looks like a cave.

“Are you going to just drive into it?” Michael asks, scoffing, in a way that he’d also ask him _Are you just going to drive into a wall?_ , but Luke just nods without seeming to mind it much, so Michael frowns, staring ahead and talking a little louder. “Luke, it’s a cave. There’s barely any space for the jeep as it is. You have to slow down.”

Luke gives him a smirk.

And hits the accelerator. 

Michael takes a deep breath, eyes on the windshield, and he finds it that his heart is finding its way up his throat. He thinks he might throw up when one of the front wheels hits a rock by the entrance of the cave. But Luke’s smile doesn’t falter. 

It doesn’t nothing to help Michael’s nerves. If anything, he’s increasingly annoyed by the second.

There’s nothing he can see inside that cave, absolutely nothing, and it’s freaking him out. He breathes in once, twice, tells himself that he should keep on breathing without needing Luke to tell him that. Tells himself that if the three on the backseat aren’t waking up with a start with how bumpy this _fucking cave_ is, then they’re all dead. Michael takes a deep, deep breath, audible and through his mouth, and then Luke turns on the headlights.

They’re going to hit a wall.

Luke is going to get all of them killed.

Michael finds that he absolutely cannot breathe, despite his recent memory of having just breathed hard. He can’t make air find his lungs, his eyes are too widened and they hurt, and he’s grabbing the edges of his seat with his knuckles turning white. He opens his mouth to scream, and Luke seems to accelerate even more, and they are definitely going to die. Not by the hands of the Order or Daryl or anyone who ever wanted them dead. They’re going to die by a cave wall in the middle of nowhere in the way to Death Valley.

And then they do hit the wall. But they don’t.

Michael sees the wall, as solid as his flesh, just a few feet away from them, and once the jeeps hit it, it’s just not there anymore. Like a hologram of some sort, it’s just… not there. Michael feels his stomach flip, feels like throwing up, but the jeep doesn’t hit anything, just starts going down. The headlights still on show they’re going down a ridge of sorts, a decline flatter than the ground they were on before. 

Michael gasps for air when Luke slows down, turning to him with wide eyes.

“Welcome to Death Valley,” he smiles smugly and quietly ahead, without meeting his eyes.

It’s a pity they didn’t die, because now Michael will have to kill him.

Michael screws his eyes shut and shakes his head, bringing his hands up to his temples, massaging them. He does manage a grunt that sounds like a threat, but Luke just laughs, amused, and keeps driving, this time at a respectable speed. Behind them, Michael hears a female voice yawning, but he can’t tell who it belongs to, and Ashton’s inquisitive murmurs, but he won’t look back. He’s too focused on never speaking to Luke again, because he now hates him.

At first, there’s only darkness ahead of them. Slowly, more cars come into focus, all old and beat and big, and they’re all parked, most of them with their windows rolled down. They’re going slowly enough that Michael can see that some of them have the keys on the ignition, like they’re there for easier access in case someone needs to go in a hurry. 

His first thought is that this is stupid, because it’d make running away easier.

Then he remembers this is where people run away to.

“Aren’t you going to park here?” Michael asks, after clearing his throat, pointing at a missed parking spot, just earth between two cars, one dark blue and one black.

Luke smirks, tilting his head in Michael’s direction. “I thought you said you were never going to speak to me again?” In response, Michael glares at him. Luke’s smile grows bigger. “Nah, this is Geordie’s jeep. She may want to take it up, later, or park it here herself. I’ll drive to the city first.”

They all wake up behind him, and the excitement mixed with nervousness makes the air in the car thicker, no matter how much they all eventually start rolling down their windows, too. It’s way hotter down here, and there’s still some way to go, the way just illuminated enough to keep going by the headlights of the jeep. There’s something ahead, though, way ahead, that has light in it. Michael can’t tell exactly what it is until they get closer, and he sees it’s something suspended in the air, like a thousand fireflies, or a thousand flowers made of lightning. Michael blinks a couple of times, too engrossed in the barely flicking lights ten feet up to notice what’s under the light.

They’re houses, dozens of them, distributed in semicircles, opening and opening more and more until there are at least a hundred houses. They keep driving, and Michael holds his breath, because nobody will say a word, and if they do, Michael won’t listen.

He’s got his lips parted and his throat dry.

The jeep is almost coming to a stop as they approach what looks like the center of Death Valley. It’s a type of park, smaller than the one they had in the village Michael was born. There are at least a dozen people sitting in benches made of concrete, and two kids seem to be having a hard time climbing a tree that can’t possibly be real. The branches are made of metal, but the leaves look green enough.

He closes his mouth, setting his jaw, and takes one deep breath.

Luke stops the car, and his voice is almost shy when he turns to look over his shoulder at the others. “We’re here.”

Michael clears his throat, and looks at him.

He must look terrified enough, from the look of uncertainty that Luke gives him. Luke presses his lips together, tilting his head to the side just slightly, and all of his smugness is absolutely gone. He looks like he may apologize for not having told everyone to behave beforehand. The thought sort of makes Michael smile, but it’s out of nervousness, so he can’t really hold it against Luke when the smile that Luke gives him spells anxiety.

“Well,” Ashton sighs, apparently missing the memo on acting uncomfortable, and opening the door. “Gotta find Harry, tell him his big brother is home, and tell him an insider told me he hasn’t been washing behind his ears.”

Michael half-smiles at him. He thinks of maybe asking about Harry, when Luke had only talked about Ashton’s mother and sister being in the city, thinks about mentioning that Ashton’s still shirtless and not wearing any shoes. But then Ashton’s eyes aren’t focused on them anymore, but out to the park and the houses and to everything, and he must see something he likes, because his smile turns different, nostalgic, like he may cry.

“It’s been too long, hasn’t it,” Halsey says, and steps out of the car, too. She’s helping Geordie out with her other hand, and Luke and Michael are still sitting there, just staring at Ashton, for being brave enough to leave first.

“I haven’t seen my little brother in six years,” he looks at Halsey, and even in the dim light, Michael can see the tears in his eyes. But he still smiles big, and Halsey comes closer as if on instinct, resting her head on his chest, her hand stopping on his stomach fondly.

Ashton takes a deep breath, kisses the top of her head, then gives Geordie a brief hug. 

Then he opens the driver’s seat, staring at Luke. “Will you grow roots, or get out and give me a hug before I’m off to find Harry?” he cocks his eyebrows. His eyes are still welled up. “We’re home, Lukey!” he giggles, spreading his arms.

Michael doesn’t see the expression on Luke’s face, because Luke’s back is to him as he chuckles lowly to get out of the car. All he knows is that he hears Luke’s quiet, “We are,” and then Luke’s sighing heavily before his arms are wrapped around Ashton, and it sort of sounds like he may be crying, too, and Michael doesn’t know if he can do this.

He’s the only one still in the jeep.

He’s the only one who doesn’t belong here.

And he’s supposed to be their leader at some point.

It’s not his home.

Chewing on his bottom lip, he watches as Luke and Ashton hug each other, too overwhelmed by being back. Halsey and Geordie exchange a few words, and Geordie snorts, tilts her head to the side, and Halsey smiles at her. Michael thinks of maybe telling them, if anyone at all, that he feels like he should turn around and leave. But then Halsey’s touching Ashton’s arm to say something, and he’s pulling away just enough from Luke to bring Halsey into the hug against her will. She struggles for just a few seconds before she’s giggling against Luke’s shoulder.

Michael feels his heart sink.

They’re all supposed to be dead.

He supposes that’s what makes them all find in Death Valley a home, but Michael hasn’t known what home is for more than the past six months. 

Geordie slams her closed fists against the walls of the car, and Michael widens his eyes with a start. She shoves Luke to the side, breaking their hug, and sticks her head in the jeep, looking at Michael with what could very well pass for a grin, if a grin wouldn’t look so out of place in her face.

She’s just extremely excited, and Michael’s having trouble with the concept.

“Are _you_ growing roots?”

Michael parts his lips, but says nothing.

She rolls her eyes, and talks over her shoulder. “Luke, where are those fucking handcuffs? Might need them for Michael. He’s making me angry with the sulking.”

It’s maybe because she yells. Michael doesn’t know. What he does know is that when he snorts out loud and opens his mouth to talk, he sees what she does, too, what makes her stop and freeze. From the park, the few people have taken notice of the jeep, of them. The children are all staring at them, but it’s two of the adults that call Michael’s attention. It’s a tall woman in a floral dress and a man that has both hands covering his mouth, like it’s hard to not just scream.

But the woman does. She spreads her arms, and says, maybe too loud: “Geordie!”

And she runs their way. Absolutely runs, like a bullet fired from a gun. She runs and buries herself in the woman’s embrace, the man embracing them both, too. The sight is confusing to Michael, makes his head hurt a bit. At first he thinks she’s being taken away, that the silence from the others is impotence, but then he realizes she isn’t being hurt. She’s being loved.

Michael starts out of the car, and it’s Ashton who helps him properly, because by the time he gets out, on Luke’s sneakers and a bit surprised with all the dirt and dust of the ground, Ashton and Halsey are both staring at Geordie and the couple, with absentminded smiles on their faces.

Ashton gives him a half-hug that Michael barely registers. He’s still frowning, a little confused. “Alright, guys, I’m off. See you around,” he waves, and Luke and Halsey both sort of wave back, without really moving. 

Michael focuses on watching him go, because he’s still feeling a little weird about Geordie and the couple. They finally stop hugging, and the woman holds Geordie’s face between her hands, and the man keeps crying. Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, taking a deep breath, and asks Halsey: “What’s her tragic backstory?”

Halsey turns to him with a curious look, like it’s the funniest thing she’s heard all day.

“She’s alive in a world that hates her for not having any magick. Isn’t that tragic enough?”

Though he supposes it is, it also isn’t enough of an answer, and he wishes he’d know more, just so he’d understand what it’s like to have parents to come back to that will love you so much they can’t stop crying that you’re back. But they’re also the ones to let her go, to let her work for Daryl even though she’s so young, so they can’t be that good. Can’t possibly, Michael tells himself, and he starts coming up with all these reasons why these people aren’t as good as they seem, because then he’ll miss Karen less, and feel less scared of Daryl, too.

Luke raises his eyes to meet Michael’s, and he still seems a bit apprehensive. It’s all so absurd and pathetic. He was supposed to walk into this city kicking and screaming, preferring death to his stay here. But the thing is: he’s already dead. They all are. That’s the point.

“What now?” Michael asks, shyly.

Halsey and Luke share a look. 

“I’ll look for him first, okay? Let _me_ break the news that his son is in town, we rescued someone who wasn’t supposed to need any rescuing, and instead of killing you,” she points her fingertip to Luke’s chest, pressing against it so abruptly that he takes a step back. “I let you play boyfriend with his son.”

“Oh, you let me?” Luke smiles, and then laughs, and it’s beautiful.

Michael’s aware he should say something, be angry at Halsey talking about him as if he wasn’t there, or just relieved that she’s taking matters into her own hands without involving them at first. But he can’t. He’s just looking at the smile playing in Luke’s lips and how she responds to it with a little chuckle herself, nodding, and Luke’s smile gets impossibly wider.

“Thank you, Halz. You’re real kind to me.”

“I’m a saint,” she shrugs.

“Truly,” he nods, slowly, and because he apparently feels like it goes with saying that, he walks around her, and slides his arm over Michael’s shoulder. Michael breathes out contently with a little smile, but still says nothing, and keeps his hands to himself. “Saint Halsey, patron of dead kids dating,” he smirks.

She flips him off, and walks away.

Michael turns to look at him, with lips parted, because _boyfriend_ and _dating_ aren’t things they’d discussed. It isn’t like the terms bother him, just make his cheeks heat up a bit, and he feels like maybe they should talk about it. But then Luke notices him looking, parts his lips, too, and very awkwardly he announces: “We don’t really have any orange juice here.”

Squinting his eyes a bit, Michael stares at him.

“No fruit juice of any kind, I’m sorry,” Luke states fast, and then, “But moving on, right?”

Michael opens his mouth, then proceeds to close it again.

Both Halsey, and Geordie with her parents, disappear from the park, and left there are just a couple of curious-looking adults, and wide-eyed children. Luke looks at them to avoid Michael’s still questioning eyes, and then he sees something he likes, something that makes his smile come back, genuine and honest.

Michael leaves his embrace, but still doesn’t let go of Luke’s arm. “Luke, can we--?”

He stops himself, following what Luke sees with his eyes.

There are three adults, two small men sitting together, and one woman who’s standing by the tree, encouraging a little one to look away from Luke and Michael and to go back to the tree. Of the children, they all more or less look the same, except for one. She’s around two feet tall, with slick-looking skin the color of moss, yellow eyes that blink vertically, and two slits for a nose.

Michael holds his breath, but parts his lips, trying to get a word out. On instinct, he puts his arm over Luke, trying to push him away, but Luke just wrinkles his nose, not in disgust but making a face. The little one, the _thing_ , smiles a wide smile. Every tooth looks like a canine, a smile wide like a crocodile’s, her lips thin enough that Michael isn’t sure they even exist.

Between her front teeth, her splitted tongue comes forward, and then back.

Breathing out heavily, Michael manages to find his voice just enough to ask: “What is _wrong_ with that?” he frowns, taking a step back, trying to take Luke with him.

But Luke doesn’t move. He turns to Michael with raised eyebrows and a sweet smile. “With Tati? Nothing. She’s perfect.”

And Michael’s left behind with his drumming heart still on alert mode as Luke takes a few steps forward and kneels down, spreading his arms. It’s all it takes for the reptile-looking girl to start running, awkward and weird, until she’s wrapping her dark green arms around Luke’s neck, burying her face in his shoulder, letting out giggling noises as Luke starts tickling her.

Michael isn’t sure what to do next.

This is definitely not the world he’s used to. If the good guys look like bad guys and the bad guys are every single person alive in this world, then he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to tell the direction he has to shoot when the next fight comes. It makes him feel fidgety and anxious, but mostly just embarrassed and terrified. 

He parts his lips, taking one tentative step their way, and Luke puts her down, sitting on his legs to be on eye-level with her, and even with his back to Michael, he still sounds like he’s smiling when he says: “What a welcoming committee we got,” he laughs, rubbing her arm, and then taking both of her hands into his. Her skin shines with apparent slickness, but it doesn’t seem to bother Luke.

She looks from Michael to Luke, blinking vertically, and it makes Michael feel a little nauseated, but he swallows down all thoughts he’s ashamed of. Tati sets her yellow eyes on Luke once more, and she giggles a weird nasal sound that comes through the thin holes in the center of her face. “I knew you’d be coming back!” she says. Oddly enough, her voice sounds just like any child’s, and Michael isn’t sure whether that’s good for her, or just crueler. “Dennis is a bully, and he said you were never coming back,” she shakes her head, and Michael feels the corner of his mouth move up a little at all the contempt in her tone. “He’s mean, Luke.”

Luke chuckles, squeezes her hands. “C’mon, Tati, he’s not a bully. I told him I wasn’t coming back. Didn’t think I was at all, to be honest,” he shrugs, a bit apologetically: “You know missions can get dangerous sometimes, and you understand, right? You a big girl?”

She tilts her chin up, smugness that Michael recognizes almost washing away the reptilian features. “Yeah, I’m a big girl,” she says, decisive and firm, like it’s the one fact she trusts the most in the world. Luke smiles, runs one of his hands over her naked head. There’s very brief silence, before she’s meeting Michael’s eyes with hers, and then looking at Luke again. It comes out as a whisper when she asks: “Is this… It’s not… Not _him_ , is it?”

Michael feels his shoulder go down in surprise, and he blinks a couple of times.

Luke looks over his shoulder, meets Michael’s eyes, and there’s a little smile there.

Looking at him that way, Michael feels his heart sink hard, harder than before, harder than it ever has, or so is that it seems like. Luke’s looking at him and smiling quietly, like he’s somehow proud of Michael, and it makes him feel funny and beautiful, which is a weird combination, he thinks, especially as he’s just insulted someone apparently dear to Luke.

But he likes feeling beautiful, even if it’s gone the second Luke looks back at Tati.

“He’s Michael,” Luke tells her, and to match her tone of secrecy: “He’s Daryl’s son.”

She lets go of Luke’s hands at once, clasps her hands over her mouth, and her yellow eyes that blink vertically widen as she stares at Michael. It’s a little hard to tell why that is, until she removes her hands and there’s a giggle of excitement making her shift her weight to the other foot, staring at Michael but still talking to Luke.

Tati seeks confirmation: “He’s the Clifford boy,” she starts, then: “The one from the prophecy.”

After Luke nods at her, she giggles more.

Michael cocks an eyebrow, staring at Luke. “Just how many people know about this, exactly?”

Luke stands up, and smirks at Michael.

He walks to Michael, and for a second there, Michael thinks Luke’s going to kiss him, in front of Tati, the other people that are slowly going back to their lives in the small park, and whoever else wants to watch. Michael thinks he’d like that, blocking his dear hometown around him just for Michael’s sake, and this is why he sinks his teeth on his bottom lip with a half-smile, touching Luke’s arm. But Luke just snakes his arm around Michael’s waist and kisses his cheek.

It’s good enough that he properly smiles and stares at the ground, but not good enough that it stops him from letting out a little whine, leaning against him, resting his head on Luke’s shoulder.

Once he does, he looks at the girl. She’s still looking at them, looking like she’s trying to contain her excitement. Michael takes a deep breath, and says: “Seems you’ve heard a bit about me.”

She snorts, shoulders going up. “Who hasn’t? You’ll free us all,” she says, matter-of-factly, and Michael blinks a couple of times, parting his lips. He feels his muscles going rigid as Luke’s arm around him loosens. He shoots Luke a look that Luke doesn’t reply, and then he looks back at Tati. She’s smirking up at him. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

It makes him pause. The pressure somehow doesn’t feel so unbearable, when she says that. He chuckles lowly, leaving Luke’s embrace to walk closer to her. “I’m just Michael, okay?” he tries. She narrows her slitted eyes, unsure, and he insists: “Please.”

Tati frowns, even though she has no eyebrows. She nods, serious.

With a deep breath, he gets on one knee before her, and offers his hand. Tati stares at his hand, then back at him, confused. “It’s nice to meet you, Tati.”

She giggles, taking his hand immediately. “Nice to meet you too, Michael.” 

Her hand isn’t a slicky as it looks like, but it’s cold. It’s cold enough that it contrasts with the heavy warmth of the underground city, and it shoots a shiver up his spine. He bites back the crooked smile, tries to give her the best he can at the moment, as he shakes her hand back. 

Luke stops next to him, and Michael lets go of her hand to stand up again.

“Where _is_ Dennis, anyway?” Luke narrows his eyes, looking past her, past the park, like if he just tried hard enough, he could see through everything. His goggles are back in the car. Michael wonders if Jack could fix an update for it that would make Luke just see the people he cares for. He wonders how many people he’d see. Michael thinks it’s way more than Michael would. “Isn’t your brother supposed to chase you around all day telling you I’m dead?”

His tone is so playful and relaxed. It doesn’t match the hardness in which she looks at him.

“How old are you, Tati?” Michael asks, frowning a bit, with a vague smile, because he can tell she doesn’t want to talk about her brother, and because he’s curious. 

“Eight,” she says, sounding proud and smug again. It’s sort of difficult for Michael to see it, because she speaks like she’s older, but she looks like she’s so much younger. He decides on just nodding along, trying to make his half-smile into something bigger.

Luke gives them both a confused look.

“Where’s Dennis, Tati?” he asks again, and this time he sounds distressed, every word punctuated by a heavy breath and his voice growing more serious, his frown deepening. “Where is he?” he repeats. 

Michael looks at him. His jaw is set, he looks tense. He’s ready to either attack or run.

Her splitted tongue flickers out twice as she stares at them. Her eyes don’t blink and for a second she doesn’t look like she’s breathing, either. Then she purses her thin lips in a way that makes her look even older, and Michael knows where this is going even if he doesn’t know the specifics. It’s nowhere good, that much he can tell.

“He’s out,” she says, simply.

Luke narrows his eyes. He seems to forget that she’s just a child with the way that he breathes in and shakes his head a bit too much, saying, “No, no, no, what do you mean? Out? He’s out? There’s nothing out. He can’t go out. What are you talking about, Tati?!”

Tati blinks.

“Scavenging for food. We’re almost out.”

Luke laughs.

It’s that panicked out of control part of Luke that Michael sometimes forgets is there, covered in all the kindness and beauty. He laughs as he snorts, nervous and unbelieving. He still shakes his head some more, and talking loudly, making people look away in the park, he tells her: “You’re wrong. Dennis is only twelve. Missions don’t start until you’re at least thirteen. You’re not-- You’re wrong. Plus, plus, plus!,” he pauses, face brightening up for a second just as his eyes well up. “The warehouse food deposit was full when I left! That wasn’t so long ago. How much have you guys been eating?!” he forces a laugh out through his nose, but he just sounds more terrified.

Michael’s quiet, looking down.

She sighs heavily, looks away. “Something happened while you were gone.”

There’s a second of realization there, something that clicks for Luke and still doesn’t for Michael. He knows it’s probably something bad, but he’s never worried about it, never had it in his nightmares; not that they weren’t there, because they were, just never consisted of anyone but himself getting hurt. Not until recently, at least.

Luke takes a deep breath, like this is Tati’s cue, this is telling her he’s ready.

He isn’t. No one’s ever ready to hear what she’s about to say. Michael knows that much before she opens her crocodile-teethed mouth.

“The Order found us,” she starts, shuts her eyes vertically so she doesn’t have to look at Luke when she says it. Michael can tell Luke holds his breath, his eyes widening as panic starts wrapping around him like an old friend and third party, kissing his cheek as Luke’s first tears roll down his cheeks in the most absolute silence. “Not down here, but they found the humans. They found us up,” she says, and opens her yellow eyes again. “They knew the humans were working with us, so they took a few, tried to get our location out of them with torture. We could hear them scream,” she swallows back the memories, blinking a couple of times, as if trying to refocus.

“And nobody helped?” Luke asks.

Michael stares at Luke, having trouble associating the change that comes so fast. All that anger has subdued, and his voice sounds so small, so fragile, so breakable. Michael doesn’t want him to break, even if he knows it’s not entirely up to him.

Tati shakes her head. “Everyone who could was out in missions. Daryl was out, too, and everyone’s scared of leaving if they don’t have Daryl with them, or one of his Champions,” she pauses, presses her lips together. “Don’t be mad at us, please. Better they die than us, no?”

Luke stares at her, and sighs, staring up, at the fireflies that buzz very quietly in their version of the sky. “But they didn’t tell on us. No human said where we were hiding.”

She shakes her head once more. “Death Valley is safe,” she tells him, staring down. “But the village up has been destroyed. Humans who were out in little missions for food or guns, or down here for whatever reason, lived. Nobody else did.”

Shaking his head for a second, murmuring something none of them can hear, Luke sniffs, takes another deep breath, wipes the tears off his eyes with the backs of his hands. “Thanks for telling me, Tati. Michael and I are going to go now, okay?”

Older than a thousand years, Tati nods.

She turns away and runs to the boy who’s turned his attentions back to the tree that doesn’t look real. Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, holding his breath, waiting for Luke to finally look back at him. It takes a while. He counts to ten and then starts over and over again, until Luke’s sighing heavily, giving him a look with red eyes and wet cheeks, sniffing a bit again as he says:

“Um, look, you can wait here if you want? But I need to go up.” 

Michael frowns quietly, kills the distance between them, and he knows there are still people looking at them, even if they pretend they’re not, but he still reaches for Luke’s hand, holds one of his, and with his free hand, Michael holds Luke’s face, his thumb gently rubbing away a new tear.

“Unless you tell me you have to, you’re not doing this alone.”

Luke’s bottom lip quivers, and he frowns as he tries to hold back more tears. And then he swallows them all back, nods, and squeezes Michael’s hand. “Let’s go, then,” he says, quiet and small and looking like he’s already broken. 

He takes them back to the jeep.

If one person’s dead, then you should say you’re sorry. If a whole village’s killed, then what’s he supposed to do? Say he’s sorry until he runs out of air and his vocal cords aren’t working anymore? Michael would do it, if he thought it’d fix anything, bring anyone Luke cared for back. He wants to ask if these are people he knew, or if he’s just sad and can’t stop crying because there’s been so much death. 

Michael keeps his hand on Luke’s thigh this time, and his eyes out the window, because looking at him like this is difficult, and he’s still the same selfish cowardly person who couldn’t tell Luke to just leave him behind when they were in room 93.

They drive around the little park, around Tati and her tree-climber friend, and through the precarious streets that lead forward. They keep driving and passing cars, people that give them curious looks, probably not very used to cars in Death Valley. Michael rubs Luke’s thigh as lovingly as he can, without really stopping to think about the hole that it feels that’s opened up in his chest with how much Luke’s been crying.

Luke won’t stop crying, so he won’t allow himself to start.

It’s not his pain, anyway, he has to remind himself of that.

Eventually, the fireflies up start fading out, and they get to what seems to be the end of the city. It’s not that far, but for a city with around a thousand inhabitants, Michael wasn’t expecting it to be much bigger. When they reach the end, it still looks like it could go on indefinitely. There’s just no logic in building more houses if there won’t be people in them.

There’s an inclination up to the side, like the one they came through, and Michael holds his breath as they pass the same fog of wall that they did on the other end. Michael shuts his eyes this time, and when he opens them, he’s a little surprised to find themselves not out of a cave, but just in the woods. Luke stops the car immediately, though, pulls up the hand brakes, and Michael doesn’t have to ask why.

From where they are, they can see the destruction.

Michael covers his mouth with one hand, because he doesn’t trust himself to not gasp.

Luke gets out of the car first, runs towards it like the tragedy calls his name. Michael just follows behind, telling himself that he needs to keep breathing. If anything for Luke, then he needs to keep breathing. 

He can tell there were once houses around, but they’ve all been burned down. It seems like something exploded, the ground all black, the trees fallen around the site like it’s been touched by a curse. Luke’s breath starts getting higher and louder, and for a second, in quiet steps behind him, Michael thinks he’s just crying. But then his shoulders start jerking up a bit awkwardly, like he’s fighting a convulsion, and Michael has to touch him, turn Luke to him.

Luke’s shaking hard, the tears rolling down his cheeks freely, his shoulders going up in little sobs. He shakes his head and then shakes it harder, like if he only does that enough, it’ll stop being true. Michael pulls Luke to him even he has to do it by force, Luke sort of collapsing against him and not looking like he’s even able to hug him back. But Michael still hugs him closely, combs his slightly overgrown hair with the fingers of one hand, the other just making sure Luke doesn’t fall down.

He can’t bring himself to whisper any empty promises, so in the middle of the all the debris, he closes his eyes and whispers his one truth: “I’m here, I’m here.”

Eventually, quicker than he’d expected, Luke does react, and it takes him off guard, when Luke grips at his shirt and drops his head properly to Michael’s shoulder. Michael can feel his neck damp, can feel his whole body vibrate with how hard Luke shakes against him, but still keeps promising he’s there, because that’s the one thing he wouldn’t lie about.

He’s there. How does he make all the things that mean clear to Luke? _He’s there._

With his voice muffled a bit against Michael’s shoulder, Luke says: “They keep killing everyone. No matter what we do or don’t do, no matter how hard we try to keep out of trouble and away from them. They just keep finding us and keep killing us.”

His tears seem to have faded a bit, but it’s still hard to understand him between his sobs. But Michael’s died already, and so has Luke, so he figures he does understand even when Luke’s voice is too high for his ears or too muffled for his brain. Michael just keeps him close, because it’s the only thing he can do, and tries to tell himself it’s not the time to think about how much Order that Chaos has killed during the war.

“We keep _dying_ ,” Luke breathes out with a little snort, frustratedly. 

Michael pulls him away, tries to search his face, past the tears and the redness of his eyes and the blood on his bottom lip from how hard he’s been chewing on it. Michael presses his lips together and keeps looking at him until Luke finds his eyes, too. And when he does, when their eyes do connect, Michael can feel his vision, long past blurry, become almost fogged enough he can’t see through the tears.

He’d told himself he wouldn’t cry.

He’s never been particularly good at keeping promises. 

But this one he might:

“I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.”

The thing about Michael saying it is that he needs to. It’s missing the point, and he knows it. Michael isn’t stupid -- he knows this isn’t Luke being scared for himself. This is Luke being scared for his kind, for his people, even if humans aren’t it necessarily, not by biological standards at least. This is Luke losing it, because it’s too obvious they’re losing the war. This is the war taking its toll, Michael supposes, and Luke wanting to fight back and finding out too little too late that he doesn’t have what it takes to bring down armies by himself. That none of them do. That a thousand can’t compete with a handful of millions.

But he needs to voice his own concerns, needs to selfishly make this one promise, that he won’t live in a world without him, and he’ll keep him safe always, even if he won’t keep himself safe. He needs it because everyone keeps dying, but they’ve been vaccinated against it the moment Luke was this close to death and Michael forced an Order healer to bring him back, and the second Dylan told Michael that he was dead already, or so people said. They’re dead kids, and so, they’ll live forever. 

Michael needs Luke to understand that. He desperately, desperately needs to.

And he thinks Luke does, because Luke takes a deep breath, his chest and shoulders coming down in waves, and when as he blinks more tears away so Michael’s face comes into focus, he kisses Michael’s mouth.

Luke presses his lips to Michael’s like there are things he wants to say but can’t find the words, and Michael kisses him back like they could teleport to another time, when things were simpler and they didn’t have to worry about this. He wants to teleport Luke to room 93 but knowing what he knows now. He wants to take Luke to their first day with each other, but knowing that what he needs most in the world is for Luke to be alright.

“We need to leave this cemetery,” Michael tells him, quietly, whispers the words against his mouth. “It can’t be good for you.”

Nodding, Luke keeps close, lips brushing Michael’s when the crying aftershocks come and make Luke’s shoulders and chest go up a bit with the heaving breaths. Luke closes his eyes, says: “I gotta check on Jack. He needs to know I’m back and I’m safe.”

Michael properly wraps his arms around him, and even though Luke’s got a few inches on him, when he gets on his tiptoes and Luke’s got his head down with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Michael’s easily taller. He kisses Luke’s forehead, and tells him: “You are. I promise you’re safe.”


	16. i've taken my bows, and my curtain calls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHAT A WONDERFUL TIME IT'S BEEN SINCE THE LAST UPDATE TO NOW. LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN.  
> \- [fucking amazing fanart](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/130958309570/blackwaterlilies-the-king-the-guardian) by blackwaterlilies;  
> \- [fucking amazing fanmix](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/130982834060/mccallclifford-a-playlist-inspired-by) by mccallclifford.
> 
> how could i ever be so blessed?! you guys are amazing. thank you for everything. i hope you love the chapter! *w*

The way back is strange.

They end up leaving the car just where the city starts, because Luke says he needs to see his brother, and does Michael want to come along? Sure he does. Between cemeteries and cities underground, he’ll only feel safe if he knows Luke’s safe, too. He doesn’t say that, though, because that’d be just too much. He nods and says, “Sure,” and half-smiles, and then they start walking side-by-side, in little streets that look almost identical, passing little houses with little fireflies up in the sky making daylight a constant.

Michael’s not sure what he should ask or do. 

He’s made of equal parts concern and wanting to run away. It’s like he can feel Daryl’s presence creeping on him, on them, closer than ever, and yet he can’t make his legs work in the opposite direction. He keeps walking forward and towards him, even if he has a bad feeling about this. He was born and raised to hate and fear the man, and now here he is, in his kingdom, all because of a boy.

And survival, he supposes, but still.

He looks at Luke, the quiet way he’s searching houses like he hopes to see some movement inside any of them, but without his goggles and the bright smile, he looks like someone else. Michael wants to go back for the goggles, even if here Luke doesn’t need them, just so he looks less naked. 

“Does he live close?” Michael asks, just to have something to say.

“Sort of.”

Running for their lives, there’s hardly any time for touching of hands or anything that could even resemble a normal relationship. But here, walking these streets, thinking back of what Luke had said before he knew about the Order finding the humans in their village up, about them dating, he feels a little bit bold. It isn’t much, he thinks, but it’s still something, how he takes a deep breath, and to push aside all thoughts about fear and wanting to escape--not Death Valley, but Daryl--, he bumps Luke’s shoulder.

Luke gives him a half smile, like he isn’t sure what Michael has in mind, but would roll with it anyway. And then Michael bites back his nervousness, his hand brushing against Luke’s, until they slow down their steps. With more courage than he’s had to call his Chaos magick in battle, he links his pinkie to Luke’s, and waits.

At this point, he doesn’t think it’s rejection that he fears. 

At this point, it’s probably just the calmness that comes and goes in between the thrill of war. It’s a scary thing to care for someone when they could die. Makes you care a thousand times more. It’s when there’s no threat that Michael’s scared of what he’ll do or say, because how could he justify it then? But Luke doesn’t disappoint. Whatever his expectations, Luke doesn’t disappoint.

He takes Michael’s hand in his properly, enlacing their fingers. 

“Well,” Michael starts, clearing his throat, a grin spreading over his lips. “About what you said, about the lack of _orange juice_ in here,” Michael pauses, blinking a couple of times, because Luke’s stopped moving. He’s standing there, not listening to Michael at all, and Michael glares at him, is about to call his attention, when he sees where they could be.

It’s a house that doesn’t look any different from all the others they have passed, but this one doesn’t have its door or windows closed. The door is ajar, the windows all open, and the little Michael can see from the window shows him a laboratory of sorts, chemicals in tubes spread over a long table in separated kits. In the end of the room, there’s a door, but just before it, another long table, this one with four computer screens. All of them show code, though, that much he can tell even from the distance.

“Jack?” he asks, quietly.

Luke nods. “Yeah,” he squeezes Michael’s hand.

He’s not sure Luke can tell how anxious he gets, that he sucks on the ring around his bottom lip as he stares at the house and his eyes well up again. He’s cried too much today, his eyes are still red and even though Michael’s tried his best to stop it, he still sounds like he’s run until his lungs gave out, a bit hoarse from all the sobbing. 

But Michael doesn’t know what that’s like, so he can’t beg Luke to stop this time.

It’s not even that he doesn’t know what it’s like to have siblings, though he doesn’t. It’s that he doesn’t know what it’s like to be this close to be face-to-face with someone he cares so much, and thought he’d never seen again. To an extent, there’s Karen, but now that he’s in Death Valley, the chances of them seeing each other again are so slim that he can’t bring himself to get worked up over that. Instead, he feels a little anxious for meeting Jack, and in his head he makes up scenarios that this is going to be a formal meeting, finally meeting Luke’s family after what feels like a hundred years, hoping for approval and exchanging nervous glances.

Sort of like what Calum and Maddy had that one time. Only in war.

“Let’s go in,” Luke says, squeezing Michael’s hand again, like it’s Michael who needs the reassurement or the encouraging. Michael smiles quietly, but walks with him.

Luke doesn’t let go of his hand, which Michael’s sort of glad for, because he’s nervous. He doesn’t have the growing anxiety that makes him look a little scared like Luke does, but he still wishes Jack could take one look at him and immediately approve of him, of what they’re doing, whatever name they put to it. 

Approval isn’t something he gets much, anyway. It’d be nice if things started to change.

“Jack?” Luke asks, careful but loud enough, pushing the door open, and walking in with Michael closely behind him. 

It’s sort of. Well. It’s what Michael would expect a laboratory in Death Valley to look like. The walls look dirty, wallpaper scraped and beat, but the computers look new and good. The chair, made of red leather, is almost all ripped, and doesn’t look too comfortable. It’s only one, presumably to be moved around the room, but all the equipment looks shiny and brand new.

There’s someone sitting on the chair, but even though Michael doesn’t know Jack yet, he can tell it isn’t him. 

“Ashton? What are you doing here?” Luke asks, raising his eyebrows. And then, after only a split second, panic seems to hit. He lets go of Michael’s hand, walking to Ashton purposefully. “Where’s my brother?”

Ashton, sitting on the chair, just shrugs, pointing back with his thumb. “Just taking a shower, relax. Unlike mine, who’s probably fucking dead by now,” he stares.

Luke seems to have not heard the second part. He walks straight to the door that Michael had seen through the window, and knocks on it. He calls for his brother’s name, and when he hears an annoyed “What?!” he seems to let it go, breathing out slowly, his back against the door, and looking finally at Ashton again. “Harry’s out with the food scavenging party?” he asks, voice suddenly small and unsure.

Ashton gives him a look, like Luke already knows the answer to that.

Michael supposes he does.

Taking a second look at him, now that Michael isn’t as confused, he can tell that Ashton’s been crying, too. For a whole different reason, he supposes, but his eyes are also red and there’s a certain defiance in his eyes that makes looking at him difficult. Luke doesn’t meet Ashton’s eyes, looking down, and Michael closes the door behind him, just to have something to do with himself.

Though he remembers Luke’s outrage when Tati told him about the kids leaving to find more food, Luke still says, like he’s absolutely sure: “Harry’s a big boy, Ashton. He’s almost thirteen anyway. It wouldn’t be long until he started leaving on missions.”

Ashton narrows his eyes, staring at Luke.

“He’s just a kid,” he says. He spits the last word, like Luke should know better.

Michael thinks he does know better. It’s just useless arguing. The boy’s still gone.

“We’re all just kids,” Michael argues, sighing softly, walking a bit closer to them, without really getting close enough to any. He waits until Ashton looks at him, and then he gives him a little sympathetic shrug, because again, that’s better than nothing. At least Ashton looks a little less angry, so he’s counting it a win.

Luke walks toward Ashton like he isn’t sure he deserves to, like he had anything to do with the kids leaving. Michael stares at him, and it clicks for him that Luke may think he’s responsible for the Order attack on the village. It makes him narrow his eyes, like it’s his turn to blow up, but it isn’t, not yet.

“What are you doing here anyway?” Luke tries, raising his eyebrows, voice smaller, quieter.

“Needed to see a friend,” Ashton shrugs, looking down. “I mean, I’m leaving Mum and Lauren in the city. I thought I’d at least see my brother. I can’t deal with any of this if he dies,” he says, matter-of-factly. 

Like the second Harry dies, so will he.

Michael wishes he had a brother, just so he’d know what it’s like to depend on someone so much. Even though there are people he cares for, in the end it’s just himself, and it can get a bit lonely, only killing and dying to keep on breathing. He’s died a few times so he can keep himself alive, and he doesn’t think it’s as beautiful as committing to die if someone else does.

Luke parts his lips, but the frown in his forehead spells guilt. 

So Michael stops him, gets on the table in front of where Ashton’s sitting, and asks: “Tell me about them?” Ashton stops, tilts his head to the side. “About your family, I mean. Your mother and sister are still in the city and your brother here? It’s just curious. If you want to tell me, I want to hear about them.”

He doesn’t know what Luke looks like right now, but he hears his low chuckle.

As for Ashton, though, he gives Michael a small smile and nods, taking a deep breath before speaking. “Mum and Daryl met while he was still in town. Before you get any ideas, though, he and Mum never met like your Mum and him,” he snorts, raising his eyebrows, and he probably doesn’t know that the thought makes Michael’s skin crawl, so Michael snorts, too, and Ashton moves on. “It was before the war. It was before everything. She had already met some Chaos witches, but never someone as powerful or organized as Daryl. He was talking about finding a place where Chaos could live, protected from the prying eye of Order. Mum though that was a good call.”

“What do you,” Michael starts, then shakes his head. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“No, it’s okay. You want to ask something?” Ashton asks, raising his eyebrows, all suddenly helpful, anger gone completely. 

Michael parts his lips to talk, sees Luke walk to him, sit beside him on top of the table, and only then he asks: “You mean that Daryl started Death Valley? Where do Chaos even was before that?”

“Everywhere,” Luke tells him, darkly. Michael looks at him, and though he appreciates the closeness, Luke’s shoulder brushing against his, he still wishes he could focus a little more, to ask the better questions. “We just didn’t have a home. It wasn’t illegal to be Chaos before the Magick War, just heavily frowned upon.”

Michael nods, looking down.

Ashton presses his lips together. “So, yeah, Death Valley was Daryl’s idea. He found a couple of allies, you’ll meet some of them later. He got himself a team he could trust, and Mum was in them. She was Order, worked in the hospital, and could smuggle some medication for him and his new city. But she knew the War was starting, and she didn’t want me or Lauren to take any part in it, so she asked me to take us with him.”

“Anne, Ashton’s Mum, is really nice,” Luke tells him, smiling quietly. “His sister is nice, too. We sort of all grew up together, after Jack and I moved here. Lauren is a bit-- Well, she snaps really easily,” he chuckles, rolls his eyes, and Ashton nods vehemently, with a fond nostalgic smile. Michael can tell he already misses her. “But all in all, she’s a great girl.”

“When both Lauren and I were old enough, um,” Ashton starts again, looking back at Michael. “Mum used to live in the town next to the capital, right? So when we were old enough to help, she asked us if we wanted to move with her to the city, get some jobs. She’d found herself a new job in the State Hospital. Lauren and I left, but Harry was too young at this point.”

“Didn’t people notice when she got pregnant with him?” Michael asks.

“She faked an abortion,” Ashton replies, easily. “It’s easy enough when you work in a hospital and know who you can trust,” he shrugs. “Shipped him to us not long after.”

Michael tries not to stare, the idea all too horrifying. He bites back the insides of his cheeks so he doesn’t comment on it, on how afraid she must’ve been of her children growing up with Order that she’d rather ship away a newborn. He wonders who went to take the child, too, if it was Daryl himself, or somebody else, one of the people they’d told him that Michael would meet.

Mostly, he just wants to ask how come that she trusts him. What type of person is she, if she trusts someone like Daryl?

Hopefully, Michael doesn’t have the time to ruin the moment. Jack opens the door of the bathroom, stopping all three of them. He looks a lot like Luke, only older and sadder, his blond hair shorter but glued to his forehead, uncombed and a little darker. He seems even taller than Luke, too, and when his eyes fall on Luke, his frown disappears, and Michael and Ashton are both inexistent to him. The second the corner of his mouth starts going up, Luke sprints towards him, like a child who’s spent too long without his parents, and wraps his arms around him, the speed taking them both a few steps back as Jack smiles properly, closing his eyes and hugging his brother back.

“Hey, penguin,” Jack says, his voice deeper than Luke’s, too. He touches the back of Luke’s head, tilts his head to the side a bit, kisses his cheek, smiling hard. Michael hears Luke chuckle a bit, putting minimum distance between them, and Jack smiles harder, kisses his forehead, and when they stop and look at each other for a second, Jack messes Luke’s hair, and shoves him away playfully, with a pretty smile on his lips.

“I’m alive,” Luke tells him, excitedly.

“You better be,” Jack snorts, smirking up at him. “I’d find you in the afterlife and hunt you down if you died on me. Don’t you dare,” he says, pointing a finger at Luke. Luke just nods enthusiastically. And then Jack’s eyes fall on Ashton, with a small smile, and then Michael, finally, with a frown. “And you are Daryl’s child, I’m assuming.”

Alright. One small approval, and he tells himself it’ll all be alright.

He nods, teeth sunk on his bottom lip. Ashton chuckles lowly, says, “He’s not what we expected, though. He didn’t even know about the prophecy,” Ashton cocks his eyebrows, and Jack gives them an amused smile, wrapping an arm around Luke’s shoulders, and pretty much dragging him closer to the other two. Luke looks happy to be dragged along, though, keeping his smile. 

“How come? Didn’t your Mum tell you about it?” he asks.

Michael shakes his head no.

If he could, he’d kick himself. He’s doing really well at being articulate. Jack probably thinks he’s mute, or just really dumb. He rolls his eyes, parts his lips to talk, but Luke cuts him off before he has the chance.

“Be nice, Jack,” he says.

Jack gives him a look, like he’s offended that Luke could think he wouldn’t be.

“So let me get this straight,” Jack starts, raising his eyebrows back at Michael. “The Prince of Chaos was born and raised without even knowing what was coming for him? For us?” he points at the space between him and his brother, then him and Ashton. Nobody says a word. Michael least of all. “I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’m glad you’re here. If anything, it’ll keep Daryl busy with something other than getting on my fucking nerves about developing more of that eye drug, but I mean… how are you going to lead people you don’t know shit about?”

Michael doesn’t have an answer to that.

“The prophecy never said anything about a date, Jack,” Luke says, getting out of his brother’s embrace with a hard look. “It’s not today or tomorrow. He has time,” and then, finally, “Leave him alone, please.”

Jack cocks an eyebrow at Luke, then looks at Ashton. Ashton sighs and looks away.

“Oh my God, are you two…?” he trails off, this time his finger pointing at the space between Luke and Michael. Michael parts his lips, tries to say something, but again he’s interrupted before he can come up with something good enough.

Ashton says: “Jack, you’re being an asshole.”

Jack opens and closes his mouth, just like Michael had done before, but then he eventually shrugs, like he can’t argue with that. He gets up on the table on Michael’s side, and Michael clears his throat, trying to start over. “So I’m Michael.”

“Prince of Chaos, yeah, I know who you are,” he says, but his tone of voice is less accusative now. He offers Michael his hand. “I’m Jack, Daryl’s favorite prisoner.” 

Michael frowns, but takes his hand anyway. “I don’t understand.”

“Which part? You being the prince or me being the prisoner? Because I can go on for hours about both,” he raises his eyebrows, gives Michael a small smile, but this time, it almost feels like he’s in on the joke. 

Luke sighs heavily, and Ashton gets up from the chair, stopping right in front of them. “He just got here. Maybe give him some time to adapt?” he tries. 

Jack chuckles lowly, shrugging again.

And Michael has a feeling about Jack, like he’s the type of person who doesn’t like giving others time to adapt, and he can see how that’s okay. Especially if there are things that people aren’t lying to him about, but aren’t telling him, either. So he takes a deep breath, frowning, and looks at Luke until Luke looks back at him.

Admittedly, it takes a while.

“Luke. Why did your brother say he’s a prisoner?”

Luke sighs heavily, shakes his head. “He’s exaggerating. That’s not exactly how things are.”

Snorting, Jack pulls his legs up, so he’s sitting cross-legged on top of the table. “Damn, Luke, so things must be very different for you and and for me,” he says, raising his eyebrows, and although there’s both a hint of mockery and a hint of hurt in his eyes, he mostly just looks tired, like they’ve had this conversation a thousand times before.

Pressing his lips, Luke just stares at Jack for a moment. Then he says: “If it wasn’t for Daryl, we’d have starved to death.”

“Maybe,” Jack says. “Or maybe we would’ve found our way to a nice orphanage and ended up with new parents, and never even know what war means,” he ponders. 

Luke narrows his eyes, parts his lips, and Michael can tell that something bad is coming, maybe something Luke couldn’t take back. Ashton can tell, too, because he touches Luke’s chest as if Luke could suddenly just jump on his brother, from kisses and hugs to punches and kicks. Ashton clears his throat loudly, calls both Luke and Jack’s names, and Jack chuckles lowly, looking away, while Luke sighs and glances Michael’s way instead. Like: did he see that? Did he notice the bad things? Is there still time to pretend like there aren’t any?

“Quit it,” Ashton says to either of them, or both. “Doesn’t matter what could’ve been. We can’t change that.”

Shifting a bit on his place, Michael stares down at his lap, because he doesn’t know where else to look. If he looks at Jack, he’ll end up asking again, about what he meant when he said everything he said, too many parts that could mean too many things. If he looks at Luke, he feels like he’ll have to say or do something meaningful, and he’s so tired for those, especially since they came back down. And if he looks at Ashton, he’ll have to listen to him, and he doesn’t want that, either.

He says: “We’re home now. Alright?” 

Michael doesn’t want to listen to that, because he isn’t home.

Or, well, he doesn’t know what that should be.

He’s licking his lips, trying to find something to say that is neither a question nor something meaningful, when suddenly Jack’s body jerks back abruptly, his back and shoulders hitting the end of the table forcefully. Michael blinks rapidly and gets up from the table, staring, taking steps back, towards Luke and Ashton, towards something that makes sense.

But they make sense of it faster than Michael.

Jack’s eyes widen and he gasps for air, and his hands go to something around his neck, but there’s nothing. There’s nothing around his neck, but something’s pulling him towards the door and choking him. 

Luke’s nostrils flare as he narrows his eyes and takes a deep breath. He looks like he’ll go for it, for the nothing that his brother is struggling against, but then Ashton holds his back, says, “Easy, easy,” and the second time he says it, his voice raises so much that he’s yelling.

Michael’s terrified.

He thought no bad things could each them down there in Death Valley.

Then someone clicks their tongue, and it’s none of them. The invisible arm choking Jack becomes visible, and behind him, dragging Jack across the tale, is a man about Luke’s size, with all black eyes and long black eyelashes, a mean smirk full of white teeth, and one eyebrow cocked.

“Welcome back, boys,” he says.

Jack tries to gasp for air again, struggling against him, but the man just pulls him out of the table for good, and Jack doesn’t have control of his legs, kicking the air as he tries to scream, tries to breathe, anything. Luke groans what sounds like, “Caleb,” and Ashton pulls Luke back again.

“What--” Michael tries, caught between them, but Luke interrupts him.

“Let him go!” Luke yells, but it’s shaken and broken and doesn’t sound like three words but one. Ashton says something Michael doesn’t catch, that sounds restraining and angry at once, but Luke doesn’t listen. His eyes are on Jack, and Jack’s eyes are tearing up as he breathes hard with the little room in his throat that allows him to. “I promise you, if you harm a hair on his head, I’m going to fucking gut you,” Luke says, this time between gritted teeth. He shoves Ashton aside, and Ashton blinks a couple of times, disoriented. Luke takes another step towards Caleb, raising his voice. “You don’t let him go right now, and I’ll stick a bar of metal down your fucking throat, and make it grow until you’re begging to die.”

There’s a fire in his eyes, then. All baby blue, no magick behind, but there’s fire in them.

Michael isn’t sure where he should be scared or attracted, is a little concerned for both. It’s just that he knows, with all his being, that Luke’s not joking. That he could and would do these things. It makes him pause, look at Luke under a different light, and he wishes, he really does, that he could take a step back and say this is not for him, that Luke’s too much, that this is all too much. But seeing how far he’d go to keep the ones he loves safe, all he feels is a thrill going up his spine, like he could join in that if there was enough room for one more.

Ashton sets his jaw, looking past Luke and at the man.

Caleb doesn’t seem to take Luke all that seriously, though. He tilts his head to the side, and in the process, makes Jack yelp with the sudden new angle, worse than before. He can still breathe, apparently, but even less so. 

Michael remembers what it feels like, to not be able to breathe.

It makes something tingle up his throat with the memory. He thinks it’s bitterness.

“Seeing as you should be dead, I’m not particularly worried for what dead kids can do,” Caleb shrugs. When his shoulders go up, his free hand punches Jack’s side abruptly, and Jack cries out.

Caleb laughs, sounding manic, and Michael turns to Luke immediately, an impulse that is faster than Ashton’s, and when Luke starts Caleb’s way again, it’s Michael who holds him back, body blocking his path. He doesn’t know this guy, and though his magick seems to be invisibility, which in itself isn’t all that dangerous, if Ashton was so eager to stop Luke from confronting him physically, then there should be a good enough reason. 

“Luke,” he says, warningly, and Luke’s chest collides against his, but he doesn’t shove him away, just looks right over his shoulder and to Caleb and Jack. 

Luke snorts, and then it’s his time to go off, a smile that only appears every once in a while coming to his lips. He sounds weird and powerful, like someone else entirely, when he says: “Let. Him. Go.” 

It’s not in the way the words are paused or his eyes are staring at Caleb like he may find a gun and shoot him in the face. It’s not his eyes or his tone of voice. It’s his eyes that aren’t turning back, but should. It’s the fabricated magick that runs in his veins. It’s the mind control.

Michael takes a deep breath, turning to Caleb immediately. 

It’s like the seconds divide and expand, and Michael can see the exact moment where his grip on Jack loosens, and a frown of confusion starts to form. And there isn’t any time to think about it, is the thing, there isn’t any time to consider what might or might not happen if it works out or not, because if he doesn’t do something, Caleb will eventually connect the dots that Luke gave him an order that he found himself physically incapable of saying no to.

Michael blinks his eyes back, and with a single deep breath, he raises his hand in Caleb’s direction, and he isn’t fully connected to the atmosphere around them yet, can’t tell air from water from dead molecules, but he still closes his fist in the air, and just like that, Caleb’s letting go of Jack, both of his hands going to his own neck, like Jack had done before.

Like Michael had done, falling to his knees, when room 93 got attacked by Order.

It’s a little scary that he doesn’t stop immediately after he hears Jack falling down to the ground, registers vaguely as Luke runs to assist him. He feels air like it’s part of who he is, feels the air that’s in Caleb’s throat, and freezes it. He stops air from flowing, and can hear him gasp in horror, but can’t really stop just then, because he’d never connected to air before, and it feels… grand.

Then he feels someone squeezing his shoulder, and blinks his eyes back. 

It’s Ashton. He looks concerned.

Caleb falls to the ground, too, gasping and trying his best to keep on breathing.

Michael looks away from Ashton, the sudden embarrassment weighing his shoulders down too much, and instead looks at Luke. He’s got his arms around Jack, knelt down next to him, and Jack’s got his head against his little brother’s chest, his arms down, apparently too weak, just breathing hard and keeping his eyes ahead. His eyes are on Michael, but Michael pretends like he doesn’t see it. Luke doesn’t, anyway, with his eyes closed and both of his hands around his brother, a silent chant like a broken lullaby quiet enough that only Jack listens.

It’s just a couple of seconds, but it feels like forever, and then Caleb’s raising his head, staring at Michael with a curious look. At first, Michael thinks it’s anger, but it doesn’t match the fire of hatred that Luke had in his eyes just seconds before. It takes him a moment to realize it’s interest.

Getting up from the floor a bit hesitantly, Caleb cocks an eyebrow with a sly smile.

“Air manipulation? Well, bite me, soon we’ll need an Order-born campus,” he snorts. He coughs, too, right after. Ashton stiffens by Michael’s side, but doesn’t stop Caleb. “Who are you?”

Ashton doesn’t give him time to answer. “What were you thinking,” he half-asks, half-yells. “You could’ve hurt Jack. Why did you even do it? You’re fucking insane.”

Caleb snorts when he looks at Ashton, like he’s offended with the accusation. “Excuse me for pulling a little prank on you two, God. When will you learn to take a joke?” he rolls his eyes with a small mean smile, and walks towards them, just a bit. He ignores Luke’s eyes burning on him, Jack only now starting to hold Luke back. “As for Jack: who cares, right? I thought Luke would be dead by now. Everyone did. The prophecy never said anything about him living for more than his purpose,” he shrugs.

Though Ashton’s about to say something, Michael doesn’t let him, figures if Ashton interrupted him before, then it’s alright that he does now. “Your name’s Caleb, right?” Caleb nods, pretentious and mocking. “I’m Michael. I’m also not Order. I’m half-Order, and I’m half-Chaos. That’s because I’m Daryl’s son, and if there is another little _prank_ you’d like to pull, I’d suggest you start with me this time around.”

Caleb looks like he’s been punched.

He takes a step back, giving Michael a long interested look, and his smile comes back bigger and brighter than before. He smirks up at Michael, chuckling and shaking his head. He starts with a low, “Oh my, oh my,” and then he’s properly grinning, coming closer to Michael, and as Michael stares at him with a frown and a hard expression, Caleb bows down ceremoniously. “My prince, what an honor to finally meet you,” he says, with his head down and then, looking him up in the eye, he adds: “Your real Champions were very eager to see you.” 

Michael narrows his eyes, staring at him, trying to find some more mockery, but all he sees is a weird sense of accomplishment and pride. It throws him off a bit.

Luke snorts loudly, getting up, helping Jack up, too. “I’m every bit of a Champion as you are, Caleb,” he spits. They walk past them, and Luke helps Jack sit. Caleb just gives Luke an unimpressed look, almost pitiful. “Fuck you,” he concludes, pointing at Caleb’s face, but without furthering his argument.

“Caleb’s the real kiss-ass Champion, he means,” Ashton helps with a pressed smile, raising his eyebrows.

In response, Caleb just shrugs. “Oh, excuse me for wanting to serve the king! Excuse me for actually being good at my job, unlike you two and the rest of your lazy kind,” he stares at Ashton this time, cocking an eyebrow. He lowers his voice, asking: “How’s Dylan, anyway?”

And for a second there, Luke thinks Ashton might punch him.

“Not worth it,” Jack says, and that seems to pull Ashton back. 

Ashton gives him a look, and takes deep breath, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. “I’ll see you all later. I can’t be here right now,” he says, giving Caleb a dirty look as he passes them.

Instead of keeping quiet like the rest of them, Caleb waves. “Bye, Ashton!”

Then there’s silence.

Luke pretends like Caleb isn’t there anymore, and so does Jack. Mostly, Michael has a hard time looking away from him and his entitled smile. It’s like the second he looks away from him, he’ll blink his eyes back to become invisible again, and stab Michael in the back for having almost choked him. He doesn’t trust him enough to look away from him.

But Luke sighs heavily and asks Jack: “How you doing?”

Jack shrugs, rolls his eyes. “Been better. But I’ll live,” he says, and Michael thinks he sees a little smile in the corner of his eyes, but he’s not entirely sure, because Caleb’s dropping his head back dramatically.

“God, you’re all such downers,” he says. “Anyway,” he turns back to Jack. “Daryl’s just back from his trip and he wants to know if you have the drug ready or we’ll have to cut your food,” he says, with a pressed impatient smile, similar to the one Ashton had just a minute before. Jack rubs his eyes and sighs again. “Seriously? You still don’t have it? You know we need to replicate it like, at this moment, if not more people who actually matter will die, right?”

Michael frowns at him. “What drug,” he states, instead of asking.

Caleb parts his lips like he means to bite back, but it dies down in his throat, and he decides to give Michael a real response. “Your Dad started developing an eye drop that can change the eye color when it’s rolled back,” he says, unusually helpful, from what Michael’s seen, and then adds: “The big guns have been using it, but we’re almost out, and unfortunately nobody seems to be good enough at replicating it in time,” he scowls back at Jack.

Jack sighs softly, says: “I’m an engineer, and not the chemical type. I need time with these things.”

“Guess what,” Caleb raises his eyebrows. “You don’t have it.”

He’d sort of expected Luke to explode at that, or at least comment something snarky, but he’s quiet, rubbing his brother’s shoulder as if to just make sure he’s there, but without condemning Caleb’s words. It must mean he agrees with the importance of that. That only makes Michael more nervous. The longer he spends there, the more he stumbles upon things he knows nothing about.

“Leave,” Michael says, and points out the door.

And in this newfound so called princedom, the one good thing that he has found is that Caleb gives him one look that spends a second too long on him to not be terribly hurt, and nods quietly, starting out. Over his shoulder, though, he says:

“Make sure to work on that drug, Jack. It’s either that, or no food.”

Michael shifts his weight to the other food, looking at them, still keeping his distance.

“Is he serious about the food?” he asks quietly.

For the first time since they got there, Jack regards him not with mockery or teasing or cryptic words. Instead he just takes a deep breath, raises his shoulders, and says: “Not really. I mean, yes, but he knows someone always brings me food anyway, and he just turns the other cheek. It’s symbolic, I guess,” he snorts, like he guesses it’s disgusting instead.

“He wouldn’t actually let you starve. Hasn’t let anything truly bad happen to either of us,” Luke reminds him, hand still on Jack’s shoulder, and he does sound small then, like he hopes Jack won’t be mad at him for bringing it up, but has to anyway.

Jack gives Luke an unimpressed look. “He’s just not letting me _die_ , Luke. He wants me alive because I’m useful alive. This isn’t about any other thing.”

Luke doesn’t argue. Instead he just shakes his head, and keeps by his brother’s side.

Slowly, like he’s careful not to step on anyone’s feet, Michael walks closer to them, and pulls himself up so he’s sitting on the table he was before, when Caleb approached them with his eyes rolled back and his body invisible. Michael stares down at his hands, feels his heart speed up at having used Chaos magick so abruptly and fast, but if none of them are commenting on it, he feels that he shouldn’t, either.

But every time he thinks about it, about what it felt like, he feels a little sick and a little thrilled.

“Will you tell me about this Champions thing?” Michael asks, more Luke than Jack, though he’s still staring down at his hands, still sort of thinking of his Chaos magick, just trying to distract himself with other things.

“Um,” Luke starts, then pauses. Letting go of Jack, he turns to Michael. “It’s not everyone who can fight, and definitely not everyone who should, so some of us do, and some of us don’t,” he shrugs, feet angling towards each other as he seems to make himself small almost on purpose. Michael raises an eyebrow, but before he can just roll his eyes and tell Luke to be clearer, he is. “Daryl can’t be everywhere, fighting every fight. He’s the leader of Chaos but he can’t do everything by himself. So he has us, and we fight the battles he can’t.”

Michael’s eyes go from Luke to his brother, but Luke shakes his head.

“Not all of us, no. I’m a Champion, but I guess nobody takes me seriously, because I didn’t really work hard to be one. There was the prophecy, so I became part of the fight without ever having to prove myself--”

“You worked as hard as everyone else,” Jack interrupts him, adding almost quietly.

Luke goes on as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Order-born aren’t really taken much seriously either. Ashton and Dylan, as well as a few other people, have been working undercover with Chaos for years, and they’re Daryl’s Champions too, they’re just fighting a different fight, that doesn’t involve as much blood as it does espionage,” he explains. 

Michael nods slowly, then: “How come I’ve never heard you or Halsey or Geordie talk about this Champion thing?”

Giving him a little smile, Luke shrugs. “Because it’s stupid. A war title doesn’t make us any better than the people who are fighting to keep alive down here,” he says. “Geordie isn’t a Champion, though. She’s been working with us for years, with Daryl especially, and she’s definitely a big part of keeping some type of market between us and the humans around, but no human can be a Champion. It’s a witch thing. You did get that right about Halsey, though. She’s the Head Champion.” 

“So you’re saying that even though people like Caleb aren’t really all that big on Order-born, they have to answer to Halsey?” Michael raises his eyebrows, amused.

Luke laughs weakly, nodding. “I guess you can put it that way, yeah,” he holds eye-contact with Michael, and then: “But it’s different with her. It’s all very… She’s Daryl’s favorite, you know that, don’t you? Geordie told me she said something about it. While you were away, for all these years, she was his child. Many people still call her the Princess. She just happens to be a warrior as well, like anyone is if they have the choice.” 

Michael doesn’t look away.

He stares and stares and stares, and tries to find words that express what he feels. 

What comes out is: “But they’re stopping. They’re seeing her differently, because I’m here now.”

Jack contributes with raised eyebrows and a bitter: “The return of the prodigal son.”

Then Michael thinks he gets it, where the initial hostility came from; not at Michael not knowing enough about Chaos, but at what it meant that Michael was finally in Death Valley. That their world was changing, and they couldn’t do anything to stop it. That people like Caleb and other Champions like him, were probably looking forward to Michael coming to Death Valley so Halsey could mean less and less. 

He could be wrong. That’s just how he reads it now.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Jack. 

Michael doesn’t even mean it for something specific. It’s just everything.

Based on the way Jack looks at him, he’d say Jack gets it.

Luke chews on his bottom lip, looks like he wants to say something, but for the second time someone comes to Jack’s laboratory, only this time it’s with a shy knock on the door. They all turn, find Halsey standing there, with her cheeks pink from running, and an urgent look in her eyes.

“Fucking finally. Thought you’d run away,” she mocks, raising her eyebrows defiantly at Michael. Michael smiles at her quietly, feeling a little out of it. And then she says what she’s really there to say: “Daryl’s ready to see you, Michael.”


	17. you don't have to pretend to be an orphan anymore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guys!!!! thank you so so so much for the comments last chapter. i haven't replied yet because i was traveling, and as soon as i was home, the first thing i /needed/ to do was write. but tomorrow i'll get to the comments!! i appreciate them a lot :') thanks a million, truly. AND ENJOY THE CHAPTER! (⌒▽⌒)☆

It wasn't often that they could afford the luxury of something like that, watching TV together late at night and giggling together at reruns of movies so old there isn't a single witch in them. It isn't that they don't like the same movies, even, just that there's always something. When Karen isn't too stressed out because of the Council, Michael has an upcoming test or it's a school night. One thing or the other, but this, right there, sitting side-by-side on the couch, sharing the end of a bowl of popcorn on a Saturday and watching an old romantic comedy, this is rare. 

It's a formulaic story: boy meets girl. Oldest story in the book. But Michael still loves it, and turns the other cheek like he doesn't know Karen loves the genre just as much. 

He's sixteen and chuckling lowly because Karen actually gasps quietly when boy kisses girl. Like she couldn't see it coming miles away and hadn't seen it w thousand times. 

After a cheeky joke from the girl, the credits start rolling. Michael gives Karen a look, and she's still staring at their TV screen with a satisfied smile. 

It rolls off his tongue before he knows what he's doing. “How come you never dated anyone after Dad?”

Karen turns to him, like she's been slapped. She frowns, parts her lips, and Michael clears his throat a little awkwardly.

“I'm talking about John, Mum. When I say Dad, I mean him.”

She closes her mouth, gives him a pressed smile, like she knew that. She didn't. Michael can see the relief washing away concern and making her look younger. “Well, how do you know I'm not?”

He snorts. “Right.”

Karen scoffs, shaking her head with an amused smile. “You don't follow me around. You don't know who I talk to or date. Maybe I am dating someone.”

Michael drops his head against the backrest of the couch, with a small smile. “Mum.”

Rolling her eyes, she drops her head too, so she's looking at him. There's a smile there, but it looks different. “Couldn't invite anyone into this house, Mike. You know I can't risk anyone finding out about you.”

And he remembers, with some bitterness, that this is why something like this is so rare. It’s more than their apparent inability to find time for each other. That in the end Michael’s still sort of hiding, and Karen’s to blame. Or more correctly, he supposes he’s the one to blame, for being born and being half-bad, but he didn’t ask for this, either. 

Sometimes he wonders the extent to the truth in her concern. Though he knows about the law, knows it’s illegal to be Chaos ever since the war, he doesn’t know how bad it could be, being caught by them. A government that doesn’t kill can’t be too bad, he thinks, and maybe Order Prison isn’t as bad as Karen says. He doesn’t _want_ to go, but can’t see how it’s as terrifying as she claims.

Mostly, it’s hard to not hold a grudge for being kept away from the world so often.

He presses his lips together for a second, looking away. When he looks back at her, the atmosphere seems to have shifted a bit. “Can I ask you a question? About him?” She doesn’t ask who he means. The drop in his tone of voice must tell her. She only sighs and looks away, but Michael takes it as a yes. “What’s he like?”

Karen snorts, puts a stray of hair behind her ear. “He’s Chaos, Michael. What do you expect?”

What does he expect? He’s not sure. He’s expected both everything and nothing over the years. 

Right now, he could do with the truth.

She fills in the blanks: “Daryl’s a monster.”

* * *

“The fuck do you mean, Luke’s not coming?!”

Halsey sighs, shakes her head and walks purposefully in Jack’s laboratory. She ignores Michael, his arms spread in outrage, and Luke’s reticent tone just behind Michael, and turns to Jack instead. “Jack,” she tries, with a bit of a frown. She starts to say something, but Michael walks around her and stops in front of Jack, so she’s forced to look at him.

“Halsey,” he says, between gritted teeth, all momentary peace between them disappearing.

Jack tilts his head to the side so he can look at Halsey. “Glad you didn’t kill my brother.” She rolls her eyes, but gives him a dutiful wave, taking a step to the side so she can ignore Michael and look at him. “Knew you’d do what’s right.”

“Well, it cost me,” Halsey says, pressing her lips together. Michael parts his lips to talk again, with a frown, and she sighs once more, turning to him. “God, you’re annoying. What?!”

Michael snorts. “What do you mean, Luke can’t come?”

“Daryl wants to talk to Luke in private later. He wants to see you now,” Halsey says, avoiding Luke’s eyes, staying focused on Michael instead. 

Though he can see Jack and Luke giving each other a brief look, his eyes trail back to Halsey’s. “He’s never talking to Luke in private again. I’m not going to give him the chance to do what you didn’t,” he says, because not saying the full word makes it somehow more hypothetical.

He’d like it all to be very hypothetical, but the tired look in Halsey’s eyes tell him it’s anything but. 

“Don’t be bratty,” she sighs, looking at him.

It sounds like she’s begging please, even if her mouth won’t move that way. Michael frowns, staring at her, trying to reason with her when the words won’t find his mouth in time, either. Jack calls Luke’s name, but Luke doesn’t go to his brother. Instead Luke stops behind him, wraps his arms around Michael’s waist and kisses his cheek when Michael turns to look at him.

His eyes must be widened in anxiety to match the panic building in his stomach, but Luke looks annoyingly full of finality, says, “It’s okay, Mikey,” and gives him a sad little smile that makes Michael angry. 

Though it feels good to be so close to him, that it’s surprising enough that neither Jack nor Halsey say anything in time, Michael still takes a step away from him, shaking his head. “No, stop getting yourself killed,” he says, pointing at Luke, like he has any blame in this. Luke half-smiles, like Michael just doesn’t understand, and Halsey looks away. It makes Michael all the more nervous. “I’m not going to go there if you don’t come with. He’ll just have to come here instead, I guess,” he shrugs, snorting loudly.

Halsey massages her temples, and looks at Jack.

Luke tilts his head to the side just a bit, still looking at Michael, looking as warmly his as he was a second before, like he hasn’t noticed yet that Michael left his arms. “He’s your father. You have to give him the chance you never could before.”

“Yeah, turns out he’s not a bad guy because he’s Chaos,” he turns around, spreading his arms to Jack and Halsey, as if to include them. “He’s just a bad guy because he’s a fucking psychopath!”

Out of nowhere, defensive anger comes to Halsey’s voice as she interrupts his scoff, turning to him with a frown and a hard expression as she says: “You don’t get to talk about him like that. You don’t _know_ him.” 

She spits the last four words between gritted teeth, like if she could, she’d punch Michael right here and there, kiss her knuckles first or not, but drag him along so he stops fighting the inevitable. Michael doesn’t like the tone in her voice, but he likes even less the tone in Luke’s when he sighs and nods, says, “She’s right. You don’t. He’s not a villain, Michael.”

Jack rests his weight back against the chair, wrinkling his nose in a funny way. “Eh. Depends on who you ask,” he shrugs. Michael looks at him, and Jack gives him the tiniest bit of sympathetic smiles, before he’s adding: “I mean, if you ask _me_ , I’m not going to have the same opinion as his dear Champions,” he raises his eyes at Halsey, and then Luke.

Michael couldn’t care less about Champions and prisoners, even if Jack’s condition in Death Valley still intrigues him. Right now, all he cares is that Luke doesn’t leave his side. 

To stop any further conflict, he turns to Halsey again, and taking a deep breath, he tells himself it’s important he sounds as collected and adult as he feels he’s not. “I hope you brought some tranquilizer with you, because I’m only leaving this lab without Luke by my side if you have a dart for me. If you want to fight, I will fight back.”

The anger fades to give room to something that looks balanced between sudden respect and, at the same time, a major lack of being impressed. She tilts her head to the side, staring at him. “Why would you ever make my life easy, right? If you can complicate it all the more?”

Michael snorts. “This isn’t about you.”

“And it shouldn’t be about me,” Luke contributes helplessly, and Michael glares at him. It does make Luke smile a little, but it doesn’t stop him from wanting to shove him for making things worse. “It’s a family moment, Michael, I don’t think I have any place in it,” he shrugs.

Narrowing his eyes, Michael stares at him. He considers giving him a big speech, telling him all the important things and justifying himself, but he sees past Luke’s apologetic shrug and bravado. It makes him sigh, still staring. “Don’t,” he says, simply, and turns back to Halsey. “So what’s it going to be?”

She looks at Michael for what feels like solid ten seconds, and then she rolls her eyes, and turns away, leaving the laboratory. Michael takes that as a win, and his fearful heart doesn’t feel as heavy when it sinks with his ego so boosted in that, taking Luke’s hand with his and dragging him out of the laboratory without saying proper goodbye to Jack first.

He’d just figured he’d follow, maybe. He doesn’t. Jack gets up from his chair, and Luke waves at him as he stumbles out of the lab by Michael’s side, but Jack just gives him a concerned look, and doesn’t dare touch the side of the door.

It’s then, and only then, that Michael sees a bracelet around his wrist.

It’s different than the one Michael had at first, but it looks like it has gems in it, too. He frowns, still looking back, until he stumbles on Halsey, body meeting hers abruptly. She comes to a halt, turning to him with a glare, breathing out heavily. Michael’s about to apologize, say he’s got distracted, when she says a bit too loudly: “Are you fucking kidding me, Michael?!”

They’re not far enough from the laboratory that Jack couldn’t hear it, but they’re far enough that other people in different houses could. Even with everything closed and no soul out in the streets, it still sounds like a lot, her exhausted tone of voice and Michael cocking an eyebrow and starting a sentence he can’t finish, too dumbstruck by how she’s blowing this out of proportion.

“What do you _want_ from me?” she adds, and Michael doesn’t think she’s talking about how he should be more careful when walking anymore. 

She has that look in her eyes, like she’s closer to tears than to havoc, and Michael can hear the hidden word in what she said. What _else_ does he want from her? Michael lets go of Luke’s hand, and hopes he sounds as honest as he feels when he looks at her and tells her:

“Halsey, I’m sorry, alright? About everything. If I could, I promise you I’d tell him and everyone to just forget about me and keep you--”

Halsey snorts, interrupting him. “That’s precious,” she shakes her head with a dry smile on her lips. “You think I want you to be sorry? You think I want your pity, your longing looks, your sympathy? You think I care about any of that?” she mocks, raising her eyebrows high. 

Michael sighs, looking away, both from her and from Luke. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Nothing,” Halsey says, immediately. “You’ve done enough.”

Michael looks back at her, cocking an eyebrow. “Well, I’m sorry for being born.”

“Apology not accepted,” she sighs heavily, raising her shoulders.

Snorting, he takes a step forward, ready to raise his voice, make a scene if he has to, the outcome still as pointless as the fight, no matter who wins the argument, but then Luke’s voice interrupts them both, the seriousness of his voice making him sound older, or just making him and Halsey look like spoiled children. He asks: “What did he do when you told him, Halz?” 

When Michael tries sincerity, it comes out pretentious and forceful. He’s not used to it yet. When Luke does it, it’s effortless and genuine, working as an even more drastic contrast between what Michael picture Chaos witches were, and what they actually are.

Halsey blinks something that looks an awful lot like pain away, and frowns. “Not important.”

“Halsey,” Luke tries, taking a step in her direction, closer to her than Michael is. “Did he hurt you?”

His voice is small, but still perfectly audible. She glares at him, disgusted, like the idea is too wild and unthinkable. “Of course not, Luke,” she says, slow and insulted. Luke shifts his weight to the other foot, like he’s not sure what to do next, and then it all comes rolling out of her tongue, all aimed at Luke, Michael listening as just a side effect: “Said he couldn’t trust me anymore. That I could’ve jeopardized his relationship with his son. Said he can’t have a Head Champion he can’t trust,” she snorts, and in the last word, when she raises her voice, her eyes well up.

Michael looks away, because it feels unfair to watch.

Luke approaches her, touches her arm unsurely. “Are you not the Head anymore?”

Though he may not be looking at them, he still hears the despair in her voice when she says: “I’m not a Champion of any kind anymore, Luke. I’m not anything at all.”

* * *

Predictably, nobody feels chatty on their way to the house.

Michael can’t tell what’s on Luke and Halsey’s heads, but if he was a betting man, he’d say Luke’s going over what Halsey said about her not being a Champion anymore, and Halsey’s accessing what is it that she is if she’s not what has apparently defined her through all her life in Death Valley.

It’d feel like somehow cheating on their friendship dumbly referred to as alliance if Michael tried to hold Luke’s hand now, so he doesn’t. He just walks on Luke’s other side, watches them orbit towards each other without saying a word, just to fit their silence.

Still people whisper, come to their windows to watch them pass. 

Michael hears a couple of them refer to Halsey as their princess, but it doesn’t match the number of times he hears inquisitive tones of voices with the word prince. None of them look, though, and Michael just knows about his motivation for keeping his eyes forward: he’s terrified.

In school, they’ve mentioned his full name, the more religious folk regarding him as the Anti-Christ, though those were also the people regarding Chaos as demons, and Michael’s had enough of fearing and eventually accepting hell before he got to third grade. 

From Karen, he never got much. Just a name that gained history in the mouth of other people. He knew about Daryl bringing down a whole army of Order by himself, the biggest killing spree anyone had ever seen, in the old City Council that had since been rebuilt. He knew about the way people exchanged nervous glances whenever a poor unfortunate boy from clueless parents ended up with a name after Order’s worst villain, Chaos’ biggest savior.

The name in itself had history that Michael didn’t understand.

He didn’t even know what was Daryl’s magick, or what his face looked like.

All he knew was his wrath, and more recently, his oddly selfless sense of community.

It didn’t add up, just like nothing had ever since the man whose neck Ashton bit and destroyed had arrested him. And now, as the three of them stop before the tallest house as far as the eye can see, Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, his heart drumming, his head echoing with words that don’t connect together. 

Air feels too cold against his throat. He tries to breathe in more slowly, but he can’t, ends up breathing shallowly instead, exhaling and inhaling through his mouth. It makes him feel a bit dizzy, like he can’t get air to his lungs anymore, no matter how hard he tries.

He tells himself he needs to stay calm enough that he can negotiate Luke’s safety and his own. 

Halsey starts forward, but Michael suddenly reaches for Luke’s hand, squeezing it. Luke gives him a curious and startled look, and though Halsey knows about it, Michael still whispers when he tells Luke: “I need you to, I need-- I need you to tell me to--” he trails off, breathing shakily. 

Luke frowns before he shakes his head slowly, like he doesn’t want to, like it must pain him to. Michael knows for a fact that he doesn’t, and he needs it so bad. He’s convinced he can’t breathe, his mouth moving, his nostrils flared, but he’s shaking his head, too, vehemently so, and his vision starts to blurry.

It’s fast, but in his head it’s in slow-motion, how Luke tells him, “I can’t,” and looks apologetic, looking away, like looking must pain him too, like everything does. And then Halsey’s shoving him aside and all Michael sees is her eyes, until all he sees is the blue of her hair, and his chest is going up and down more rapidly, and he kind of wants to throw up.

She yells at Luke, but Michael doesn’t hear any of it.

All he hears is the blood vibrating in his head, his heartbeats echoing in his veins like they’re empty saloons too old for use. He throws his head back and feels his vision whiten, not by magick but by low blood pressure, and with some horror he realizes he must be about to pass out.

And finally, comes Luke’s eyes seeking his, blue connecting to his green, and then his voice, coming into focus all of sudden: “Breathe, babe, breathe.”

He sounds desperate, Michael will give him that, but it still has the weight that he needs to pull him back. Slowly he takes notice of Luke’s hands on his shoulders, grabbing too tightly, Halsey’s hand around his wrist like she may somehow stop him from falling down if it came to it. Maybe she could, with her magick, but that’s not what stopped Michael. It was Luke and his.

Michael gasps for air, not coming back as smoothly as he had when Luke had used his magick on him before. This time it was too late, had reached him when he was almost all gone, and he feels his whole body shake just twice with the shivers that run up his spine. His eyes are still covered in tears, and when he blinks them away, breaking eye contact with Luke, it sort of feels like his shoulders are lighter, too. He closes his eyes, and Luke wraps his arms around him, murmuring apologies, trying to explain himself, or something of the sort. His voice has gone back to being distant as Michael chuckles lowly, receiving a kiss on the cheek by Luke, his body warm against Michael’s, Michael finally hugging him back.

Halsey’s looking at him when he opens his eyes, but he can’t read her expression.

“Just had to make a scene,” Halsey says, but she doesn’t sound mean.

Michael snorts, tapping the end of Luke’s back as if to show he’s alright, and swallows back the lump in his throat. “Can you blame a guy for wanting a dramatic entrance?”

Luke stops in front of him, blocking him from seeing what Halsey’s face looks like when she snorts at him and his lame joke, holds Michael’s face in his hands, and he still looks apologetic, looks like he may start crying as well, his thumb wiping away Michael’s tears.

“I just don’t,” Luke sighs, “I don’t want you to think that,” he shrugs, frowning, staring at Michael’s wet cheeks, trying to wipe away any trace of tears as if that wipes away the last few seconds.

Halsey sighs heavily, stops by Luke’s side. 

“You don’t want him to think you’re making him do anything, he gets it. He was having a fucking panic attack, you stopped it. He’s fine, you’re fine. Can we go?” she asks, lowering her voice, then, touching Luke’s arm to make him look at her. 

When he does, Michael looks away at the people. They’re still in their windows, watching, questioning, whispering. Michael takes a deep breath, tries to swallow back some fears with the tears that he’s let go of, and removes his arms from around Luke.

“We can go,” he tells her.

Luke just gives them both a look, and nods, too, sniffing and looking away.

The first thing Michael notices is that there’s no gate around the house, and when Halsey turns the doorknob, the door opens without a key. He wonders if all the houses are like this, or just Daryl’s, that anyone can come in at any given time, and what that says about their community, about Death Valley, about overtrusting people like Luke or even Ashton, who’ll believe the lies they want to even if they ring false, if they’re from the lips of someone they care about.

Then he looks up, because he still needs something to keep his mind busy, and the millions of fireflies are still buzzing quietly and making them see the light where it’s none.

It starts making him feel sad though, so he looks inside the house he’s about to step in, and he feels colder inside instead. It’s an ample room with floor made of wood, looking way more refined than Jack’s laboratory, the only other house he’s stepped inside in Death Valley. Though it’s a big enough room that it could easily fit couches and a television, bookshelves to no end, there’s still not much furniture at all. There’s an old-looking carpet, two cupboards that look oddly misplaced, and a few chairs by the window, though there’s no one sitting.

In the corner of the room starts a staircase up. In the other side, there’s a narrow corridor. 

“Which way?” Michael asks quietly.

Luke gives him a small smile, bumping his shoulder to Michael’s. “Our rooms are there,” he points at the corridor, and Michael frowns, meeting his eyes. The Champions. They share a house with Daryl. He turns to Halsey, wants to ask if she’ll have to move out now, but he doesn’t.

There’s no time for that. She’s pointing at the stairs, and starting without them.

Michael swallows back his nervous heart, and looks over his shoulder twice just to make sure Luke’s still there before he follows Halsey’s footsteps. The staircase creaks a bit under his feet, but he stares at the empty walls instead, wondering what it would’ve been like if a real family lived inside, with embarrassing photographs covering the walls. It makes him so ashamed to think of what it’d be like, if that family was him, Daryl and Karen, that he stares down, ashamed, hating himself for it.

Karen would be ashamed of such thought.

He is, too, almost immediately.

The second floor is just as poorly decorated as the first. There isn’t any luxury like Michael had in his house with Karen, or the Hood family had in theirs. There’s no high ceiling or white drywall, no wallpaper or fancy lamps. The second floor doesn’t have a carpet, either, just the wooden floor that looks beat even though it can’t be older than him. 

There are three doors in the corridor, and then one double door at the end of corridor.

As if reading his thoughts, Halsey points at the first door, says, “Head Champion bedroom,” then walks more, points at the second, “your bedroom,” she says, voice not faltering, as blank from emotion as when she started speaking, “his bedroom,” she points at the third, and then, finally, walking straight to the double doors, she touches the doorknob on one side, and says: “And his office.”

She looks at them, as if asking whether she can go on.

Luke presses his lips together, touches Michael’s wrist but not his hand. “I really think I should go.”

Michael gives him a small smile. “Are you scared?” His voice must sound mocking enough, because Luke laughs quietly, starts shaking his head, but Michael stops him from replying, says: “Because I am.”

That seems to be enough, Michael thinks, because Luke gives him one look, and then nods, looking at Halsey and giving her a small nod too. 

She opens one door, then the other, and Michal sees unfold like he’s watching a movie.

The man is sitting on his chair, a desk in front of him. He has papers in his hands and a laptop on by his side, but the second the doors open unannounced, he drops them. Michael tilts his chin up, staring at him, meeting his blue eyes before he forces his feet to take another step.

He watches the corner in the man’s mouth curve up as he looks at Michael, standing up, ignoring both Halsey and Luke, probably not even noticing him. Michael just sees him, the almost preying look in his eyes, how it looks like he’ll never stop standing up, powerful and big and with a smirk that makes Michael want to cry in fear.

But he doesn’t. He feels the tears coming, but bites the insides of his cheeks in a brave smile.

It isn’t a smile, not really. Smiles are supposed to make you feel warm. All he feels is like running away. He’s walking straight into the office of the monster who’s practiced genocide openly against his kind, or so he thought, when he believed what school had taught him, and when he thought Order was his kind. Not that Chaos is, now. He’s something in between.

And before him, is standing his father, the leader of Chaos, who he’s supposed to overthrow eventually. He’s smirking and breathing out: “My son,” as he slowly and carefully around this desk, towards Michael.

It’s not slow enough that Michael can run his reactions by his brain first. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, taking a few steps backwards as he sees Daryl walking toward him. It makes them both stop, and Daryl frowns in disappointment, but Michael can only think that his reaction was to leave everyone behind, and he knows that will haunt him. He breaks eye contact, because Daryl’s eyes are too heavy and tense, and Michael feels like crying too much, but when he looks at Halsey she’s staring down, dealing with pain of her own, the knuckles of her fingers turned white with the tight grip around one of the doorknobs, and when he turns to the other side and looks at Luke, Luke’s staring down, respectful and quiet, and Michael doesn’t understand.

Luke’s supposed to be loud and chipper or angry and wild.

Michael hates this tamed small version of him. 

But just like that, he’s drawn attention to Luke. Daryl clears his throat, walking too closely to Luke, and Michael’s body is a mess of impulses, wanting both to run away and to put himself between Daryl and Luke at the same time, ending up frozen on spot instead of taking action. Daryl stops just a little before Luke, and when he speaks, his voice is quiet and firm, saying: “I thought I’d made it clear that I wanted to see my son, and my son alone, didn’t I, Halsey?”

It’s being asked to Luke, the words practically against his face as he stares down, but Michael knows Daryl expects an answer from Halsey, even if he’s not looking at her. Michael turns to her, wanting to somehow interfere, but she gives him the smallest of nods, as if saying she’s got this.

“I apologize, Daryl,” she says. 

Just as tamed and small. It baffles Michael. How are these warriors and survivors dropping their heads to this man? Who _is_ him?

“It was me,” Michael says. The first thing he tells his father after seventeen years separated is that it was him. He was responsible. He wants to be held responsible and he will, even if he has to kick and scream until all eyes are back on him. “I insisted. She made herself perfectly clear, but it was my one condition. I’d only be here if Luke was with me. I would, by the way, have run away on the first week if I didn’t want Luke by my side,” he raises his eyebrows.

Daryl turns to look at him.

There’s something playing in his lips that isn’t surprise. It’s pride, maybe, but Michael wouldn’t say it’s that exactly. It’s more self-congratulatory, as if he thinks that any of Michael’s good traits must’ve come from him. Or, again, Michael could be completely wrong. He knows nothing about the man, except that he hates looking him in the eye.

There’s just such weight to them, like it’ll drag him down if he keeps looking.

But he stands his ground, eyebrows raised and eyes welling up but without a single tear rolling down his cheek. He bites the insides of his cheeks, too, as if that could draw some strength to him, and Daryl chuckles, until he’s smirking again.

“Just stepped foot into my house, and you’re already making threats of leaving?” he asks, sounding legitimate curious, doubtful of even having heard it right. Michael sinks his lips on his bottom lip, but doesn’t find it in him to say anything else. Daryl nods quietly, taking a few steps away from Luke. “Very well,” he murmurs, and then, just loud enough to make himself heard: “I don’t suppose you’d feel comfortable with a hug?”

Michael shudders, his shoulders going up in defensiveness. He wrinkles his nose and turns his head away before he can stop himself, the disgust too tangible to be masked. But it doesn’t make Daryl offended, doesn’t seem to even when Michael screws his eyes shut, face turning away, because he only sighs softly and walks back to his desk.

“All in due time,” he chuckles lowly, then raises his eyebrows again. “Halsey, my dear, would you be so kind to show Michael his room so he can get ready for dinner?” 

Halsey purses her lips, but takes a deep breath, and nods.

“They’ll be with me,” Michael blurts out, looking back at Daryl. All heads turn to him, and he can feel their confusion, in each one of them stronger than in the last. “If we’re having dinner, Luke and Halsey will be with me.”

Amused, Daryl cocks an eyebrow at him, taking his seat, straightening his papers. “How is it a family dinner if it isn’t just the two of us, my son?”

Michael hates the sound of those last two words in his voice. He’s made up his mind about that much already. But he figures, if he’s gone so far, he might as well push it until something breaks. “Well, it so turns out that Luke has been more family to me these past weeks than you all of my life,” he shrugs. Daryl narrows his eyes, but doesn’t seem to even breathe otherwise, so Michael takes a deep breath, and continues. “He makes me feel safe. You just make me feel nauseous.”

Halsey gasps, as if she’s been personally insulted, and Luke gives him an intense shocked stare. It sort of makes him want to laugh, out of nervousness if anything, but the three of them are still alive in this end of the room, so he keeps pushing.

“And Halsey, I mean, from what I understand she’s always been like your daughter, so,” he turns to Halsey. “We’re kind of like siblings, right, sis?” he raises his eyebrows. Halsey’s blinking rapidly at him, looking ready to beg him to stop, but Michael turns to Daryl again. “So what do you say?”

Daryl looks at him like he’s unaware of other people in the room.

Michael’s so nervous that he feels like everyone else in the room can see past his bold and full of shit smirk. Surely they all see the way his hands shake when he crosses his arms over his chest. Surely Daryl sees right past the way he holds eye-contact and his chin up because if he looks away, he feels he’ll cry, pathetically afraid of the stoic man. 

He’d half expected Daryl to tell him to shut up, have another bracelet for Michael right then and there, that pushing his luck couldn’t take him anywhere worth being, but he supposes he’s already in Death Valley, one jeep driving against a wall past hell.

It panics him, Daryl’s silence and the next few seconds. He channels Luke’s voice back into his head, telling him to breathe, and it’s not the same, but it still feels soothing, just not because of his mind control. What if Daryl says no? What is he going to do? Throw a tantrum? 

But Daryl doesn’t do that. He briefly looks away from Michael, sighs softly, and looks again at him. “When you take my place in this chair and this community, you’re going to see that there are times when a man must make harsh choices if he wants to keep his people safe. I don’t expect you to understand yet, but keep an open mind. Don’t take everything so personally,” he instructs, like a loving father who’s been around for the past seventeen years, and is just guiding him into something new. Michael has trouble holding his snort. Daryl ignores it. “You’ll see,” he says, definite and still unnervingly calm, and then: “If it’s important to you, by all means, Luke and Halsey can come,” he says, keeping his eyes on Michael. “But they’ve both disobeyed my orders, and you can’t change the consequences that come from disobeying a leader.”

Michael knows he should keep quiet. He’s already gotten what he wanted.

It’s only that he can’t.

“Oh my God, are you listening to yourself?!” Michael snorts again, shaking his head. He points at Halsey, but doesn’t break eye-contact with Daryl. “All she did was not kill her friend!” He pauses, knows he’s yelling at this point, losing his cool in a drastic difference between him and his father, but can’t make himself stop anymore than he could stop himself from starting. “Who, by the way, did absolutely nothing wrong! What was Luke’s grand act of disobedience?”

Daryl cocks an eyebrow, unimpressed. 

“Couldn’t keep his hands to himself,” he offers, simply.

Michael parts his lips, his face growing hot. He looks Luke’s way for back-up, but Luke’s the tamed small version of himself that won’t fight back or stand up for himself, and Halsey’s still shocked that Michael would dare to, so he’s alone in this.

“You do realize you can’t control who I sleep with, right? Couldn’t before Order caught me, can’t now,” he says. And saying this, he doesn’t feel his hands shaking anymore. This is the one thing he’s absolutely sure of, his one Truth, and he could expand on that, on his right to choose someone, to be chosen back, to finally for-fucking-once feel someone kissing him back and hugging him back and _wanting_ him back. But Daryl just rolls his eyes, as if that’s irrelevant.

“You could also take into consideration they endangered you by returning to the city to break Ashton out. And for what? A prophecy of more war? We all knew that was coming. Nobody needed The Trinity for that,” he snorts, as if he resents the prophet.

Michael’s quiet to that. 

A bit awkwardly, Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, as if he’s trying to balance some reason back into his head. He wants something smart and clever and that will throw him off. He wants to piss him off because he’s alive and has been for seventeen years that Michael didn’t have a father. He wants Daryl to feel like shit, because all this time he was thinking of all these people and building a bedroom for Michael in his Death Valley city, Michael never even knew these people existed and were in need of any help. He wants Daryl to hate himself because Michael hates himself.

It just catches him off guard, that this feeling expands to Karen.

God, he hopes she blames herself for how he disappeared. She knew the Order was coming for him. She knew where he was, maybe even his cell. And yet, it had to be Daryl and his team of misfit Champions to break him out, and shove him into a world he didn’t know existed, doesn’t know how anything works, and now people whisper that he’s finally come home. 

He wants both Karen and Daryl to hate themselves, because they are the reason Michael doesn’t know what home means.

“Do you have any more rebellious comments, or can Halsey show you to your room?” Daryl asks, that small expressionless smile playing on his lips.

Michael sets his jaw, and shakes his head. 

Halsey takes a deep breath, and properly opens the door again. 

Before leaving the room, he takes Luke’s hand in his.

It’s the closest he gets to flipping Daryl off.


	18. straight for the castle

The first time Michael and Calum sleep together, in the only sense they ever would, is surprisingly at Michael’s place. Usually Karen’s not a fan of bringing people over, but she isn’t a fan of having people at their house any more than she is of Michael sleeping over at strangers’ houses, even worse if they’re acquaintances of her, like the Hood family is, because of the Council.

Karen goes to bed early, and Michael and Calum both pretend to go to bed too, except they don’t. 

They wait until she’s definitely sleeping, or at least definitely locked in her bedroom with no chance of leaving before the morning, and giggling under their breath, they steal a bottle of scotch. It’s in the top of the cupboard in the kitchen, and Michael’s not supposed to know about it, but he’s seen Karen drinking sometimes, when he’s, again, supposed to be asleep.

They’re fourteen, and neither is tall for their age -- Michael even less so, a few inches shorter than Calum, a few pounds heavier, and too many nights more stayed awake, the round purple circles around his eyes to prove it. Calum never comments on that, or on anything about Michael’s appearance, and it’s both good and bad. Good, because he wouldn’t like to be called out on it, have someone questioning why is it that he can’t sleep at night -- it’s the nightmares, but he wouldn’t tell that to anyone in the world -- but bad because it means he’s just not paying enough attention. Not as much as he is, anyway.

Michael climbs on Calum’s back to get the bottle from the top cupboard, and Calum holds his legs but almost trips them over, the giggles becoming too loud and worrying, but at this point, sneaking from his room to steal a forbidden alcoholic beverage to drink with his best friend, Michael thinks he wouldn’t even care so much about getting caught. There’s something thrilling and wonderful to that, right there, wrapping his fingers around the neck of the bottle and smiling victoriously as Calum grabs at his shins too tightly, about to almost lose balance again.

“Be quiet, for fuck’s sake!” Michael hisses, but he’s biting back a smile at the same time, kicking Calum both to quieten him down and, illogically, to make him keep his balance. Calum only gives him a look, raising his head, and he looks so happy.

He feels happy, too, is the thing. That’s why he wouldn’t mind getting caught. No amount of yelling from Karen could erase what he feels right now.

They sneak to Michael’s room after that, don’t bring any cups with them because that would be clues they’d had to clean up later. Or wash, which would be the same thing, and they’re not feeling like it. They just make it to Michael’s room as soon as they can, passing the big living room watch that marks a quarter after midnight, and then Calum’s closing Michael’s door behind him, a soft click and a new thrill of energy and nervousness making Michael grin.

Michael drops to his bed, waits for Calum to do the same.

Calum bumps his shoulder, smirking up at him. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

Smiling sheepishly away, Michael feels his cheeks heat up, holding the bottle of scotch like it holds the secrets that could keep him safe. “Me neither,” he says, quietly.

And then he’s unscrewing the cap, raising his eyebrows at Calum, and when he brings the neck of the bottle closer to his face, he can feel the strong smell of alcohol, so heavy that it makes him want to wrinkle his nose and look away. But Calum’s watching him with excited brown eyes, and he couldn’t possibly back off, no now that he’s got his attention. So he smirks just a bit, and gulps it down.

It’s horrible.

The taste makes his tongue feel numb, like he’s just drunk a cleaning product; the smell of alcohol invading his nostrils like it’s from inside, like his throat will never get rid of that awful taste. He can’t help the knee-jerk reaction, wrinkling his nose and shutting his eyes, turning away and sticking his tongue out in disgust as soon as he swallows all of it. He’s worried maybe Calum will judge him for not keeping a straight face, but Calum just laughs and takes the bottle from his hands, repeating the same ritual. 

Everything the same: the bravado, the actual gulp, the faces after.

It goes on for a while, sitting cross-legged on Michael’s bed, the bottle passing between them as well with the stupidest secrets they can think of -- nothing serious, nothing major, nothing like the things Michael has nightmares about. Calum tells Michael about having had a wet dream about their classmate Maddy Harris once. Michael laughs and says he’s actually had a wet dream about one of their male teachers. Calum doesn’t seem too affected, just shakes his head and says Michael’s got bad taste, and the man has a beard. Calum says that he’s already masturbated in the school library, but only once, and didn’t go through with it. Michael laughs for what feels like ten minutes straight, and tells him he only does it in the shower, because Karen is too thorough when she’s cleaning the house, and he’s afraid she’d somehow find any clues and confront him. That makes Calum laugh for what feels like half hour. Michael loves it.

Then it gets to him and to them, that the alcohol’s buzzing through their minds and veins, making their heads feel heavy and their bodies feel weightless at the same time. Calum puts the bottle on Michael’s nightstand, and Michael drops back on the bed, staring at the ceiling with his hands on his belly, feeling like he could fly. Calum drops by his side not long after. Michael can feel the heat coming from his body, and when he shifts a bit, their arms brush.

Michael presses his lips together to keep all the secrets inside.

Calum asks him: “Do you ever think about the future?”

Snorting, he lies. “No. What are you even talking about?”

It takes Calum a moment, hesitating and thinking things through before he replies. Michael thinks he changes his mind on what he was actually going to say, but what he says is: “Just school and stuff,” and then he’s moving away, turning the light off and dropping on the bed again, forcing Michael to relocate.

Michael lies next to him, says he’s too tired to make a bed for either of them on the floor, and Calum doesn’t complain, just shrugs it off and grabs one of Michael’s pillows to nest himself on. Michael looks at him in the dark for a second, registers what his fuzzy drunk mind can, and then he finds it in him to think of Karen, how she’s going to be angry at him for having stolen her bottle of scotch, how they’re both drunk and it’ll show in the morning, how she’ll surely call Joy and David or even drive Calum there herself, all to let them know that Michael’s a bad influence.

But now, none of that matters.

Michael smiles quietly, taking the other pillow to himself.

He makes an effort to not touch Calum at all. It makes his muscles ache in the morning, how tense he was, how careful not to brush his arm against his best friend’s, not to tangle either of his legs between Calum’s. But it pays off, he thinks, because he knows Calum won’t mind sleeping with him again, and he sort of likes that, even if it makes him bite the insides of his cheeks.

He’s fourteen, and feels a second of peace before falling asleep.

* * *

Michael’s seventeen, and he’s making an effort to touch Luke everywhere he can.

Halsey leaves them alone in Michael’s room, shakes her head but bites back words instead of telling Michael what she thinks of his little show, of confronting Daryl on his first time being face-to-face with the man. Maybe she just doesn’t know what to make of it yet, and if Michael’s honest with himself, he’ll say that neither does he. Luke does want to talk about it, though, still looks scared and like he’s been slapped, like he’s the one who was confronted and not Daryl. 

But Michael doesn’t exactly want to talk. Not immediately. 

For starters, there’d be so much to talk about, he wouldn’t know where to start, wouldn’t know how to end it, either. He doesn’t want to talk about Daryl. He doesn’t want to talk about Caleb and how Luke used his fabricated magick on him without seeming to realize -- or worse: realizing but not caring enough to stop himself. He doesn’t want to talk about Jack and his supposed status as prisoner, doesn’t want to talk about Ashton and his gone-on-a-mission child brother, doesn’t want to talk about Halsey and her uncertain fate or all he death in the human village up, and how Geordie felt when she found out. He doesn’t want to even think about any of this, let alone discuss it. 

Plus, they haven’t been properly alone since room 93, and things were different then; Michael didn’t know what he knows now, not about the world, not about himself, and definitely not about Luke. Though Luke parts his lips when Halsey closes the door, leaving them inside, Michael doesn’t really give him any time to talk. He touches his waist with both hands, pulling him back against the door, kissing his mouth like he’s feverish, like they both are dying from abstinence, or something that runs even deeper than that. It’s not just chemical, though it does feel that way as well -- it’s everything. It’s falling apart just the second before Luke kisses him back, and then being put back together when Luke cups his face, deepens the kiss, lets MIchael pin him to the door, attack his mouth like he’s desperate.

He is. Being in that room, summoning bravery from the darkest parts of his heart, spitting back at the only person who’s pulled him out of the Order Prison and the misery that came with that, it all had tired him so much, made him a million years older. All he cares about is relieving stress, pressing his body to Luke’s, touching his body and kissing his mouth, until it hurts both his muscles and his teeth.

Out of breath, Michael pulls away, pressing his forehead to Luke’s, his hands still holding Luke’s just over his head, and it does feel a bit pointless, practically breathing in and out of his mouth, their lips sore and red, their chests going up and down pressed against each other. 

The corner of Luke’s mouth goes up, just a bit, and he asks: “What was that for?”

Michael shrugs, unapologetic, letting go of his wrists and pecking at his lips once more, just for good measure. “Lost time, I guess,” he says, and Luke doesn’t look like he needs Michael to elaborate, so he goes on: “I guess we’re supposed to shower to look presentable enough for Daryl.”

Luke rolls his eyes, pushing Michael away gently with a hand on his chest, so he can walk around him. “You are. I’m not even supposed to be here. It’s incredible that I am, really, because if I was the slightest bit smart, I’d be out of here fast, before…” he shrugs, trailing off, but it still sounds like a too abrupt stop.

Michael turns around, staring at him.

It still catches his attention a bit, he details of the room, how it’s neither big nor small, with a king-sized bed in the center, a small window with more broken than intact glass, an old-looking wardrobe and a door to an ensuite bathroom, probably. There’s a painting of a cottage just above the bed, and it makes him a bit restless looking at it, so he looks away and back at Luke.

“You’re safe,” Michael says, and he believes that. 

If they’re together, they’re surely safe.

Luke sits by the end of the bed, chuckling lowly. “You’re delusional,” he offers, but he’s smiling invitingly, so Michael walks to him with a smirk, straddles his lap, places his hands on Luke’s shoulders, Luke’s timid hands finding his waist, and Luke presses a kiss to one side of his neck, then another, both chaste.

Michael cups Luke’s face, makes Luke look at him.

“Don’t leave me,” he asks.

And it’s not that it’s a proper statement or suggestion or command, and it isn’t just asking please, either. It’s something so genuine and true that a word that describes the tone hasn’t been invented yet. But Luke knows it, looks at him like he’s learned that uninvented word years before Michael, holds eye-contact until Michael realizes he’s holding his breath.

“I won’t. You know that.”

Michael presses his lips together, unable to look away from his eyes for a second, and when he does look away, he tells Luke: “There’s no place to go from here. It’s going to be alright. Even if Daryl’s a complete dick and we never get along, he won’t throw me out of the house for keeping you around, and eventually I’ll be old enough to take his place or something, right? That has to mean I’ll at least live that long,” he cocks an eyebrow with a smug smile, like it’s funny. He knows it’s not.

“Even if he forgives me,” he starts, and Michael makes a face, doesn’t like the implications that come with Luke having to be forgiven, like it’s for a sin or a crime, when it’s only for Michael. “I’ll still be a Champion. Even if he deserts me like he did to Halsey, then I’m even then a Champion, and I won’t stop fighting. Sitting around waiting for another attack isn’t going to happen. The Order came too close, Michael.”

“Yeah, I didn’t picture you for the type to accept just taking me to the movies and a nice dinner,” he half-smiles. Luke laughs quietly, averting his gaze, and Michael doesn’t have to be told there’s no such thing either in Death Valley, or for Chaos witches. “Let’s just settle for a little while, okay? Is that okay?”

Luke sighs softly, searching Michael’s face for something. It looks like he finds it, because he wraps his arms around Michael’s middle a bit tighter, bringing him closer, and he nods wordlessly. Michael smiles, an enormous sense of relief shooting through his veins, and he touches the side of Luke’s hand, guiding Luke’s mouth to his again.

* * *

The dining room is downstairs, and though the place itself isn’t much, there isn’t nearly as much food as there were in all the meetings of the Council families Michael’s been to with Karen, it still looks exactly like just that: a Council meeting. The wallpaper on the walls is ripped and there are, again, broken windows, just like in Michael’s room, but the table is long and the chairs look comfortable, too many for them. There’s a jar of water with ice on the table, instead of the confusing variety of juice and wine that there were at all the Council dinners, and one big kettle with soup inside. There are four plates towards the end of the table, closer to the big broken window. One for Daryl, at the proper end, then two on one side of him, the other plate on his other side.

Daryl and Halsey are both there already when Michael and Luke walk into the dining room.

They’re talking in whispers, nothing on their plates yet, the lamp making the whole room look yellow. Halsey’s got her hair up in a tall tight ponytail, and she’s nodding at something Daryl’s just said, with a frown on his face and rubbing his fingers together. Michael thinks it’s a bit unnerving, watching him talk to someone, especially someone who doesn’t seem as afraid of him as she looks respectful.

He squeezes Luke’s hand in his, and takes a deep breath. 

Daryl takes notice of him, of them, and stops talking to Halsey, raising his eyes at them with a small smile in the corner of his lips. He points at his other side, looking at Michael, and Michael looks back at Luke. Luke doesn’t meet his eyes, just keeps staring down as he walks slowly towards the table.

Michael sighs.

“Luke, is it okay if you sit between us?” he asks, since Luke won’t look at him.

Luke glares at him, not for what he asked but by the way he did, how he had to voice it, but Michael feels like he had no other choice. Daryl sighs heavily, Halsey shakes her head, and Luke looks at him in a way that says no and also shut up. It sort of makes Michael want to smile, if anything by how exasperated he looks, but then he looks back at Daryl, and Daryl’s got this curious expression on his face.

“Why is that?” he asks.

Not coming any closer to the table, Michael shrugs. “You make me uneasy.”

He didn’t even mean for it to sound like a, as Daryl had put it, rebellious comment. It was an honest answer for what had seemed like an honest question. Michael holds eye-contact with him, and his hands don’t shake. He feels like looking down, like staring at those icy cold blue eyes is a task that gets to the point of being physically difficult, but Daryl squints his eyes not in cruelty but like he’s thinking, and then he nods. For a split second, Michael thinks he’s going to tell him to shut up. It’s a long second, and neither Luke nor Halsey seem to even breathe. 

Then Daryl stands up, takes his plate, and sits on Halsey’s other side.

Michael presses his lips together, raising his eyebrows.

Pointing at his former seat, he says: “You sit there.”

He shifts his weight to the other foot, squeezing Luke’s hand more in the process. “What’s the catch?’ 

Daryl frowns, looking at him.

“Michael, please,” Halsey sighs, covering her face in her hands, like she’s this close of just telling him to shut up herself. 

It’s effective enough, Michael supposes, because her tone of voice along with Luke’s mortifying silence do get him to shut up, and he swallows back the lump in his throat, and walks to the end of the table, taking Daryl’s seat in silence.

Luke sits to his side, putting the plate and cutlery to his left back to where Daryl’s were once, in front of where Michael’s sitting. It’s quiet and uncomfortable, these seconds where Michael can’t look away from Daryl, and Daryl’s suddenly studying the soup kettle with an absent look on his face, tired and a bit sleepy. It horrifies Michael that this is the same man that talks about death like it’s a necessary deed, that wanted Luke dead just so he wouldn’t _mess_ with Michael’s head.

Clearing his throat a bit awkwardly, Luke raises his eyes to Daryl for what feels like the first time since they came to Death Valley. “Daryl?’ he tries. Daryl looks back at him, eyes cold but attentive. “Do we know anything about the attack on the human village? If there was any informer or?”

With an impassible expression, he replies: “There must’ve been. It wouldn’t be logical for them to go looking in the middle of nowhere. Someone must’ve told them a location, even if it wasn’t very specific. They found the humans and burned each and every one of them down because it was what they could find. It wasn’t because we’re so good at hiding that they didn’t find Death Valley. It was just lucky.”

Halsey gives him a look, parts her lips to talk, and then, as if she’s just remembered she’s not in charge of his team anymore, she closes her mouth and looks away, bitter and quiet. Daryl doesn’t seem to notice.

“We don’t know who’s in contact with the Order, though, if that’s what you’re asking,” Daryl says, pressing his lips together in a flicker of anger that is gone almost as soon as it appears. “I’m considering it may be one of the spies in the City, playing double-agent,” he trails off, raising his eyebrows.

“It’s not Ashton,” Halsey snaps by his side. Daryl gives her a look like he’s unsure, and she insists: “It isn’t. I’m sorry the prophecy The Trinity made him experience wasn’t as interesting as many seen before, but that doesn’t make him a traitor.”

Daryl clicks his tongue in impatience, shaking his head. “I don’t know about that. Anne has worked with me for two decades, always providing extremely sensitive information, helping Death Valley with all sorts of supplies. Lauren grew up to be an excellent warrior and has been in the Order army for years, letting our kind live and escape in battles no one even takes notice of, Harry’s been willing to leave Death Valley and make a difference in this community since he was old enough to walk.” Daryl pauses, looks from Luke to Halsey, skipping Michael in the process like he just wouldn’t understand. “Now what has Ashton done for Chaos?”

“Guarding The Trinity is about luck, not about loyalty,” Luke says, raising his eyebrows, and though his tone of voice is still tamed and quiet, the assertiveness in his voice still makes Michael cock an eyebrow with a small smile. “It’s not his fault nothing of value was revealed to him.” 

“It’s not him,” Halsey says one more time, before she lowers her head in defeat, shaking her head.

Daryl looks unconvinced. “There are more people I’m suspicious of,” he says, crossing his arms on the table. “I count on Geordie to help me find out. She’ll be motivated enough, having lost almost everyone.”

Luke takes a deep, deep breath, a shadow of pain making his face look ugly for a second before he’s breathing out slowly and blinking a few times. He sucks on the ring around his bottom lip, looking at Daryl again. “Um, who’s made it? From the village?”

“From the mercenaries, just the people out in missions. Geordie, Jason, Diana. Diana’s family is all dead, though; she’s back in Death Valley and already knows about it, I’m giving her some time to adjust before she’s out again. She came back with Jason last night. I imagine he’s with Geordie now, and they’re plotting their revenge.”

The calmness in his voice is off-putting. 

Michael has kept quiet through all of this, because he’d admit to still being ignorant to matters of war like spies and mourning the living almost as much as the dead. But then he hears this, and frowns a bit, turning to Daryl. “Revenge against the Order? Humans can’t take down the Order, especially not three angry assassins.”

“Humans haven’t made it clear whose side they’re on yet, Michael,” Luke tells him, quiet and small. “If they’re angry enough, and they spread that anger… I mean, if it makes them be on our side, that’s good, isn’t it? I don’t want to kill humans. I want them on our side, not just the people we grew up with. All their kind can be valuable, especially the ones living in the City among Order. They work in laboratories, they develop their own technology. They’re good, and they can be dangerous, which makes them even better.”

“You don’t want to kill humans?” Michael snorts, staring at him. “How about not wanting to kill anyone?” he tries, but Luke looks away, pressing his lips and shaking his head, and Halsey sighs, like Michael just doesn’t get it. And it’s not like he doesn’t. He’s killed before, hasn’t he? The unblinking eyes of the men he has and the stories he makes up for them in his head are a constant reminder he has.

But the banal way in which they put things still makes Michael nervous.

He wishes he’d never come to Death Valley at all.

When just a few seconds of silence grow between them, Daryl stands up again, only this time it’s to open the soup kettle, and start serving them. Michael doesn’t mind that Daryl does it, mostly just keeps a frown on his face and his eyes down, because the words still echo in his mind, and everything’s too much. Having a possible spy among them is too much. Only three humans they care about out of God knows how many surviving the genocide on the village is too much. Luke’s hopefulness for humans siding with Chaos in the war is too much, as well as Halsey’s silence, Daryl’s pointed looks. It’s all too much.

So when he has food in front of him, all he does is eat, because he feels it’s the most he can do for himself. It’s good, if anything, hot enough that it warms him from the inside, makes his chest feel like it’s not so heavy anymore. It doesn’t taste to much, a vague flavor of chicken with little chicken to go with, but it’s still the only real meal he’s had in weeks of frozen food and chips. He’s hungry, he realizes, has been hungry for maybe months, and if he keeps on eating, he won’t have to deal with the fact that he’s having dinner with his father. That’s also too much to deal with.

“Good?” Daryl asks, pointing at the soup, with a small smile.

Michael feels uncomfortable smiling back, so he just nods quietly and looks away.

“Who cooked this, anyway?” Halsey raises her eyebrows with an easy smile. “Was it Nate?”

“Nate won’t be back until tomorrow night. He’s in a mission in the border with Annika,” Daryl says, then meets Michael’s eyes for just a split second before looking back at Halsey. “I cooked the soup,” he smiles contently, snorting fondly when Halsey grins and looks down at her plate.

Michael narrows his eyes at the scene, feeling a little nauseous.

He’d been counting on Luke to at least recognize the absurdity of the situation, but since Luke seems just glad to be eating proper food, Michael sighs, looking back at Daryl, feeling it’s his job to bring back awareness to what they seem to have forgotten. “So now that Halsey isn’t your Head Champion anymore, or really not a Champion at all, are you going to kick her out of the house?” he raises his eyebrows, crossing his arms over the table.

It escapes him that he looks just like Daryl had a second ago, same body language, same expression.

“She doesn’t have to leave if she doesn’t want to, but it may be dangerous for her to stay,” he answers, placidly. “Not because of me, obviously. Head Champions don’t make many allies, much less friends, and now that she’s not in charge of the team… You’ll see when you become a leader. No leader is in the position of having friends,” he raises an eyebrow, and then continues, just as calmly, “if she does choose to stay, though, there’s a room on the ground floor for her. I’ll be needing the Head Champion room for the next one, however.”

Halsey eats her soup in silence.

Luke clears his throat awkwardly, and asks: “Have you chosen someone already?”

“It won’t be you,” he replies, fast. Luke blinks a couple of times and parts his lips, stuttering on his way to apologize, maybe say that’s not what he meant at all, but Daryl doesn’t give him time to elaborate. “I have. When Annika and Nate come back from their mission tomorrow night, all Champions who aren’t in spy missions undercover will be in Death Valley, and I can throw a dinner party to announce it.”

Luke presses his lips together, looking at him, questioningly, but he swallows down all questions he may have. Michael sighs, looking from one to the other, and Daryl resumes eating like he doesn’t care enough to pressure him into talking. Michael does, though. “What’s going to happen to Luke?”

Daryl stops eating his soup like it was forced out of his mouth. He blinks a couple of times, looking at his son, and Michael doesn’t know if he likes that, being looked at like a son, not by anyone other than Karen, who he still resents, but less than he does Daryl. He presses his lips together, raising his eyebrows, trying to look bold and brave, to his own eyes only achieving to look like a spoiled child.

“What’s going to happen to Luke,” Daryl repeats, like he’s pondering it. Halsey chuckles lowly, shaking her head, like she thinks Michael is beyond salvation. Luke doesn’t glare at him, then, he only does what Michael wouldn’t have expected him to do: under the table, he reaches for Michael’s knee. Michael’s hand reaches for his, slotting his fingers between Luke’s, and they both wait, quiet and impatient, silent but defying. “What do you suggest, Michael?”

Michael tilts his head to the side, raising an eyebrow with a vague smile. “I suggest you live him alone. Let him stay with me in my room instead of his room downstairs, which I’m going to bet isn’t as nice as the one I have, and that you let us be together.”

“So you’ve finally talked about it, then? About whether you are dating or?” Halsey asks, looking at Michael, and then at Luke, looking unimpressed but just a tiny bit interested. Luke avoids her eyes and his cheeks turn pink. Michael opens and closes his mouth. She shakes her head, chuckling lowly.

“That’s what you want? That I let you _be together_?” Daryl repeats.

He’s staring at Michael now, directly at him, in a way that Michael knows makes everyone else look away. But Daryl’s making an effort here, with the soup and letting Michael get away with all his snarky remarks, clearly wants Michael to trust him, to _like_ him. To which purpose, Michael still doesn’t know. He wasn’t built to trust people powerful people, especially not Daryl, not the man he grew up hating and fearing. Still he pushes his luck and his hopefully more charming than psychotic smile, shrugging a bit.

“That’s exactly what I want.”

Daryl keeps eye-contact for a second, and Michael almost gives in and looks away, painfully defeated. It’s too much to just keep looking at him, is the thing, that’s another thing that is plainly too much. The more Michael looks, the more he sees that though he has the green of his mother’s eyes in his, the shape of his eyes and the dark brown thickness of his eyebrows are exactly like Daryl’s. His nose, the shape of his mouth. It panics him, all the physical things that children who grow up with their parents are too numbed by routine to find out. He doesn’t want to see himself in this man. He just wants shelter and food before he and Luke can figure something else out. Before something else happens. Before they’re forced to go somewhere else, look for something better.

It ends up being Daryl who looks away first, shrugging just like Michael had, though whether it’s on purpose or not that they’ve been mimicking each other, that’s not up for Michael to decide. Daryl snorts with a small smile, that somehow still seems quite self-congratulatory, and says: “That’s what you’ll have, then, I suppose.”

Michael keeps staring, waiting for the conditions he’ll impose for that to happen.

But they don’t come. For now.

So he lets go of Luke’s hand, and goes back to eating his soup.

* * *

Michael sees Caleb again. After they’ve all eaten, not having talked much but having kept their mouths busy with the soup, all having second and third and fourth servings, Michael stands up and Luke follows his lead, and Luke looks like he may say thank you -- for the soup, for letting him live, for rolling with Michael’s impositions like he’s in any place to make them -- when Luke stops him with a frown, and behind him, in the entrance of the living room, he can see Caleb.

Caleb holds his eye for a second before he’s clearing his throat, Halsey and Daryl still sitting by the dining table, engrossed in quiet talks. Michael’s heard enough, very political stuff, who’s in what side, who’s in charge for what, and some of it is useful, like the party of younger ones who left to seek food are supposed to be returning tomorrow at noon, but most of it is gibberish to Michael.

Daryl turns to Caleb, and Michael sees in a third person what the way Daryl looks at them makes them turn into. The invisible boy who disappears into himself so he can threaten others looks down at his shoes and clears his throat once more, the excitable smile on his lips making him look out of place when contrasting with Daryl’s bored expression.

“Yes?”

“Sir,” Caleb dares raise his eyes, and then looks down again, smirking up. “Jack has finally finished the eye drug refill. It turns out, all he needed,” he looks again, this time directly at Luke, his smile turning mean. “Was a little push.”

Luke sets his jaw, and Michael reaches for him touches his arm, tries to anchor him down.

“Good, good,” Daryl says, Luke’s reaction either lost to him or irrelevant. He stands up, looking at Halsey. “We’ll finish talking later, okay?” he half-smiles, a hint of parenthood coming to him. She nods eagerly, smiling quietly, and just like that, it’s all gone, Daryl looking back at Caleb, all hardness and sharp edges. “Let’s see him.”

Caleb waits for Daryl to leave first to give one amused look at Luke. Michael parts his lips to talk, but Caleb comes first, giving Michael a genuine smile, like he’d only now noticed him. “My prince,” he bows down ceremoniously. 

Michael narrows his eyes, otherwise unresponsive.

Not that Caleb seems to mind by the lack of response. He just gives Michael a smirk, and leaves the room, too, following Daryl. Luke sighs into his hands, rubs his eyes as if to stay awake, paces a few steps away from Michael and then back at Halsey, staring at her, murmuring, “Unbelievable,” and that’s it.

Halsey stands up, too, raises her eyebrow and then relaxes them down, like that’s it, too, not much else to do but complain about it. “Take my advice: go to your room, enjoy today’s win. You’re still together, nobody’s going to come into your room at night and try to kill you. Go to sleep early, it’s a good mattress.”

Luke catches his lip ring between his teeth, and when he releases it with a sigh, he asks her: “You still have until tomorrow in your room, right? Before you’re downstairs with everyone else?” she nods, and he nods back, as if in understanding. “So enjoy your last night as the princess, Halz. Be safe.”

He walks to her, and without warning or any need to, he wraps his arms around her shoulders, bringing her close and kissing the top of her head. She sighs into him, her hands snaking around his middle, and Michael looks away, the moment too intimate for him to interrupt or look at. They eventually break the hug, and they walk the stairs up beside each other, but without a word going between them.

Before Halsey walks into her room, she says: “Michael?” he stops, looks at her. “He’s not a bad man.”

Michael presses his lips together, but doesn’t reply.

It doesn’t look like she expected a reply either way. She locks herself in her room. They stick around until they hear the key clicking into place, and then, when they walk for the second time into Michael’s newfound bedroom, everything’s changed again, a sense of collective misery almost outweighing relief.

Almost.

* * *

It’s different, when they touch and kiss and bite and lick. It’s different not because they do things that they hadn’t done before, but because Michael feels like crying, not because it hurts, but because he feels like he could die. It’s different because the bed feels good underneath them and there’s a shower available just for them, with hot running water and a lamp that works. It’s not where they go, though, instead staying closely together with their bodies sweaty and tired, Luke’s face resting on his chest, his arms tracing lazy patterns on Michael’s stomach and arm. 

Michael sighs softly, moves without a word, until Luke moves too, catching all the clues until Luke’s got his arms around Michael’s waist, pressing kiss after kiss after kiss on the back of Michael’s neck. It makes him smile just a bit, tired enough that it feels like even a proper grin would require energy he doesn’t have.

They stay quiet for another moment, one of Luke’s legs between his, Luke’s scarred chest solid and comfortable against Michael’s back. Then Luke asks him: “Do you really believe that? That we’re safe?”

It’s too much energy, sure, but he still smiles, finding one of Luke’s arms around him, taking the hand that’s on his stomach and enlacing his fingers with Luke’s. “For the time being, yes.” And after only a heartbeat, he asks: “Do you think we could stay together if it wasn’t for the war?”

Luke pauses, a dry forced laugh coming out of his mouth that Michael recognizes as worry. “What?”

“I just mean… War makes everything different. When it ends, when there’s finally peace… Do you think we can make it, then? Do you think we’re good enough that we’ll cling to each other even when there’s no danger of death or loneliness?” 

There’s another pause.

Luke presses another kiss to the back of his neck. 

“Yes.”

Michael doesn’t know how long it passes, them in the dark, the weight of Luke’s one word making it feel like a blanket over them, like the one Michael’s left in Geordie’s jeep, the one with Luke’s scent, no matter how many nights Michael sleeps with it wrapped around him. But it’s Luke’s arms wrapped around him now, and Luke says they can make it, and Luke doesn’t lie. 

His heart is suddenly pounding against his chest with the anticipation of a secret that his mouth can’t be the cage of anymore. He ignores the lump in his throat and how he feels like shaking. 

“I love you,” he says.

First he feels the smile, physically feels the smile pressed against the back of his neck. Then it’s crazy, he knows it is, but he thinks he feels Luke’s heart threatening to break free from his chest just behind Michael, too. And it’s only a split second that he waits, and then it comes:

“I have loved you since I knew you existed.”

And then, three times, one for each kiss on Michael’s neck as Michael turns around with a smile:

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Michael cups Luke’s face in his hands, and kisses his mouth.


	19. when people run in circles, it's a very very mad world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i've been [drawing again](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/131747249635/um-ive-been-doodling-again-too-much-free-time-i). someone take the pencil away from me? sigh. so it's been a specially hard week for me, so many things happening at once that were difficult for me to deal with, and this is why i haven't replied to the comments yet. this is also why i've gone back to said comments and reread them, even earlier ones, from when i was just starting the fic. your support means a lot to me. thank you for that. (i mean it.)
> 
>  **trigger warning:** some gore, and difficulty breathing. i've written about difficulty breathing before, but i feel like it may be a bit more claustrophobic in one of the scenes in this chapter, if that makes sense, and i wouldn't want to end up triggering any of you, so here's the warning about it. ♥

It’s been a while since he last sat on a park, not running, not looking over his shoulder.

Just being there. Appreciating the present moment.

It’s early spring, and the weather is so good, just the softest breeze making his oversized shirt move a bit. It’s from an old band, and he’s kept it since he was young. Eventually he grew in it, but it was never quite his size. It was John’s, before it was his. It’s the only thing from the man who was supposed to be his father that he kept.

He’s in sweatpants, too, his and not anyone else’s or stolen ones, so that’s also good for a change. Karen brought him this pair when she went to a border meeting with supposedly important people, and brought him a whole backpack of new clothes, all stuff he ended up liking, but didn’t make a fuss of, because it hadn’t seemed right at the time.

He’s not wearing any shoes, but that isn’t exactly new. He likes feeling his toes between the grass underneath them; it makes him feel like nature is kissing his toes. Michael smiles to himself, staring down at his feet, and then sighs softly, looking up. There are three swings in front of him, and one of the kids looks so much like Ashton that it can only be Harry. Michael half-smiles at the boy, happy to see he’s alright; he looks happy, there’s not a single bruise on his face or arms. He’s talking to another kid, but this one Michael doesn’t have any idea who could be.

Then he feels someone sitting beside him on the bench, and when he looks, it’s Tati. She’s wearing a floral dress, and blinks her eyes vertically at him. He half-smiles at her too, and he supposes two half-smiles makes for one full smile.

“I’m really glad to be up here,” she says, gesturing widely.

Michael raises his eyes to the sky. The sky is so beautiful today. It feels like the morning, so he’s rolling with that; beautiful cloudless morning sky, all blue with the very rare cotton white of cloud, the sky a merciful orange that doesn’t make it at all uncomfortable, just pleasant. He smirks, looking at Tati again.

“It’s good, innit?”

She giggles, so he winks.

“I’m so glad I can breathe underwater,” Tati says, suddenly. Michael cocks an eyebrow, frowns, but she just resumes talking as if his confusion didn’t affect her. “It’s because I’m half-lizard. I’m half-person and half-lizard, you see,” she smiles quietly, and her splitted tongue flicks between her pointy front teeth. “My half-lizard is made of Chaos, and my half-person is made of hope.”

Michael considers this. “What do you hope for?”

She gives him a funny smile, like he’s being silly. “Now that the war is over? Nothing. I’m just happy there’s no more death. I was tired of seeing them every single time I closed my eyes,” she says, and closes her eyes vertically, as if to prove a point. Michael feels his heart sinking a bit, but doesn’t interrupt her. Tati opens her eyes again, looking at him. “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

The last few words are whispered, secrets he’s supposed to keep.

Michael’s so sick of keeping secret. It makes him want to cry.

He feels a lump in his throat, tries to swallow it down, but it won’t go away. There’s a dark look to Tati’s small face, and he wants to ask her about her brother Dennis, if that’s the child playing with Harry in the swings. He wants to ask her about whether she’s enjoying going to school now that she can, now that the war is over, now that no Order witch is going to give her trouble for her look or her magick.

Michael doesn’t want to ask her about anything that takes away the shadow from her eyes and from the sun. He can feel the change in the atmosphere, the goosebumps rising on his arms as the clouds start covering the sun. He presses his lips, tries to change the subject fast, but his vocal cords aren’t functional and he starts finding a little difficulty to breathe.

Coughing a little, he brings his hands to his neck.

Tati tilts her head to the side, unimpressed. “Have you forgotten about them already, Michael?”

And then it’s there, the panic building in his stomach. Tati shakes her head disapprovingly, looking ahead, and Michael can’t breathe. His hands start shaking, grabbing at his throat like if only he presses it enough, he’ll be able to breathe better. But it’s not that he’s not breathing properly -- he finds that he can’t do it at all.

Through tear-eyed eyes, he follows Tati’s eyes ahead.

The boys in the swings aren’t the boys that were there once before. There’s no way that the man in the white uniform with the shot chest and the growing leaking redness is Ashton’s little brother. Through his mask, Michael can’t see his face, but Michael still feels it, like he’s a healer taking the pain himself, only he can’t breathe, so he can’t scream either.

His chest shakes. It feels like his whole body is out of control, except for his hands. His body is shuddering and shivering and slipping away from him, and he feels himself sliding to the grass, but his knees are bleeding through the sweatpants and into the green. He feels his nails digging at his neck, trying to get rid of whatever obstruction is causing his throat to block up even if he has to cut his skin open to do so.

The first man wraps his hands around the swing chains, but his head lolls forward. The second man next to him, aims a gun at Tati. She’s impassible and unresponsive, but Michael gasps again, harder than before. He coughs up blood, but finally finds some air in the process. His eyes roll back before he can put things into perspective. He raises his hand towards the man, and without even connecting to the gun, he makes it fire back, exploding in the man’s face. With his white uniform sprinkled in white, he falls down abruptly, is shot out of the swing.

Michael’s shaky but he can almost breathe normally.

He looks at Tati, wants to ask if she’s alright, but she gives him a serious look, and then shakes her head. Not saying she’s not okay, but that she disapproves. She shakes her head and makes a face, looking back at the man still holding onto the swing chains, shaking a bit, his chest bleeding.

His legs hurt like hell when he forces himself to stand up. His knees are all scraped, his elbows, too, the spaces between his fingers all dotted red. But still he finds it in him, sobbing loudly and breathing out of rhythm, to walk closer to the man.

“I’m sorry,” he tries, but his voice comes out in a murmur, and the man surely doesn’t listen.

The man only shakes more, and Michael’s vision blurs further with more tears. He sniffs, but at least that means he’s still breathing, and with his hands shaking, he removes the man’s mask.

He’s not sure what he’d expected.

He finds Luke, holding onto those chains for dear life, his baby blue eyes leaking tears and damping his face, his lip all chapped and covered in blood. He looks like he may spit blood, but isn’t strong enough to do so. It drips down his chin, and his chest shakes some more.

Michael covers his mouth, horrified, and chokes on a sob.

Luke looks down at his chest, and the bullet comes out, like time is rolling backwards. Michael frowns, and feels something cold in his hand. When he looks down, he finds a gun. He raises it, scared and confused, and his finger presses the trigger without his say-so.

The bullet shoots right into Luke’s chest, again. The blood all comes out, again, reddening all his white uniform. Luke gasps, hands bloody with the effort he’s pulling into holding the chains. “Why did you do that,” Luke tries asking, but it comes out as a statement.

Michael drops the gun to the green grass, and takes a couple of steps back, lost and shaking.

Tati appears by his side.

“Why did you do that?” she asks, tone disapproving and serious.

Why did he?

Because if he hadn’t, he’d die.

They’d all die.

They will. All of them will die anyway.

* * *

Michael wakes up with a start, body jolting forward and eyes wide in the dark, somehow still seeing everything, every shape and curve and carbon-based molecule of everything in the room, from his own hands as he stares down at them with his breath uneven, to the bed underneath him, and the broken window and the wardrobe and all the walls.

He pants, gasps for air, clenches at the front of his shirt without saying a word, because he isn’t sure he can bring himself to speak just yet. The images are still circling in his head, and he can’t make himself forget them.

Usually, he can. Not this time.

His breath erratic, he can’t focus on anything else but that. Not the images strangely in focus, not any of the cryptic things that swirl in his mind from the dream. All he can think of is making himself breath normally, as he tightens his grip on his shirt, knuckles turning white, posture erect and somehow bent at the same time.

He feels a pair of hands on him, Luke’s arms going around him, the quiet whisper of, “Mikey, Mikey,” that doesn’t seem to go anywhere at first. His voice is distant, too, and for a split second there, Michael feels the drowsy sleepiness taking over, the heartbeat still calm but accelerating. Then he realizes he’s connecting to Luke, with his eyes rolled back, the world a mess of stars instead of the world he sees normally.

Forcefully, so forcefully that his head starts pounding almost immediately, he wraps himself into himself, a boy locking himself inside a boy, screwing his eyes shut so tight that it feels like he might disappear.

Luke waits, without saying a word, without pressuring him.

But his solid warm hands, one around Michael’s shoulders, the other wrapped around his bicep, anchors Michael back, assures him that he won’t disappear, can’t if someone’s holding him back in Earth.

When he opens his eyes next, everything is darkness, and he can’t make the shapes in the dark at first. It takes blinking a couple of times to adjust, to recognize the shapes, Luke’s presence next to him, leaning against him but quietly, like he somehow understands what Michael can’t say himself. One of his hands go to grab Luke’s, the one on his arm, just touch him to make sure he’s still there, that he won’t leave, and then he focuses on his breath again, breathing in and out until it feels like his lungs aren’t revolting against him anymore.

Michael rubs his eyes with his free hand, and sighs heavily.

It must signal he’s ready to talk, because Luke asks: “Bad dream?”

His voice is calming, just above a whisper, and it soothes all of Michael’s demons, makes them go back to sleep so Michael eventually can, too. “Very bad,” Michael replies.

Luke rests his chin on Michael’s shoulder, so close to him that it feels like they’re breathing the same air. Michael remembers a time when something like that would’ve felt invasive, but right now, it feels necessary, like he doesn’t trust himself to breathe if he’s all by himself.

“You’re awake now. It was all a dream,” Luke tells him.

Chuckling lowly, Michael replies: “To an extent, yeah. It wasn’t all just a dream, though.”

Luke cups his face, makes Michael turn to look at him. Michael can’t make out his face in the dark, but he thinks, with the bit of light that comes from outside, from the never-sleeping fireflies, that Luke’s smirking. “So focus on the parts that were, and pretend none of it was real.”

Michael presses his forehead to Luke’s, one of his hands holding Luke’s, the other reaching for him blindingly, for any part of him that he can touch, his arm, his shoulder, his face. Luke’s alive, is the part that he can take solace in. The world is dying, they all are, and maybe, very likely, just being with Michael is killing Luke too. But he’s selfish enough to not be able to let go, even if that’s the case. If he wasn’t so self-centered, he thinks, he’d have been able to tell Luke to leave when they were still in room 93, and Halsey warned him against what would come.

She hadn’t said what would meant for her, though.

Michael closes the distance between them, pressing a brief kiss to Luke’s lips, because it feels appropriate. Luke smiles against his lips, touches the side of his face gently, lovingly, and Michael feels his chest swell at the confessions of last night, I love yous and stolen kisses. It’d felt divine. Michael felt divine, like they could both defeat the whole world as long as they were together.

Then he closed his eyes, and his subconscious had a few reminders for him.

“Do you really think the other Champions will try to attack Halsey if she stays?” he asks, quiet.

Luke considers this for a moment, lips parted and taken aback. “I,” he starts, frowning, and then he gives Michael a little sad smile, shrugging. “I don’t know how to answer that. A lot of people resented her for being the Head Champion because she wasn’t born Chaos. It’s more than just Caleb. Caleb is the most… openly asshat,” he chuckles, shrugging. “But she worked very hard to get the Head Champion title.”

Like Luke hadn’t worked to be a Champion himself. Michael snorts, but keeps his thoughts to himself, just clears his throat, and asks: “What happened to whoever was the Head Champion before her? Could they want to get some sort of late revenge or something like that?”

“No, no, no,” Luke says, each time shaking his head more vehemently. “The people who were Daryl’s Head Champions before didn’t give room for Halsey because that was taken from them. They felt like they could serve Chaos in different ways, and she was their recommendation to Daryl. If anything, she should go to them now. I don’t think she will, too proud, but she should.”

First, because he isn’t so scared of the monsters in his head and because they’re still in bed, Michael pushes Luke down gently, so he can lie next to him, wrap his arm around his middle, rest his head on his chest. Luke lets Michael settle, starts running his fingers through Michael’s dark new hair, the purple and white faded locks, like he’s forgotten what he was talking about.

As soon as Michael’s comfortable, though, he asks: “What do you mean, the people? There was more than one Head Champion at a time?”

“Yes, and they’re awesome,” Luke smiles widely. Michael isn’t looking at him, caressing his scarred chest instead, tracing every scar with his fingertips like he’s learning their patterns instead of erasing them. But still, still Michael can hear the smile in Luke’s voice. “I’ll take you to them tomorrow, first thing. They’ll love to meet you anyway. It’ll be fun.”

Michael nods with a slow smile.

“Okay. That sounds like a good idea.”

There’s a pause then, and it almost doesn’t feel like Michael’s just had the worst nightmare he could possibly have. It almost feels like one just woke up by accident and the other just opened his eyes to match the first. Michael thinks about that, about this bed, how they don’t have to squeeze to fit in a single bed anymore, but that’s still what they do, like by habit. It hasn’t been that long, he knows, but it’s been enough.

“I went to Halsey’s room tonight, after,” Luke says.

Michael cocks an eyebrow, looking down at his bare chest, his spread palm covering as much as he can and then going back up again. “Huh,” he says, chuckles, and then: “Did she appreciate the nakedness?”

Instead of telling Michael to shut up, which is what he thinks he would’ve done if the roles had been reversed, Luke laughs quietly and kisses the top of his head. Michael half-smiles, the chuckle dying in his throat. “I was considerate enough to put some clothes on before I left,” he says. Michael wants to tease him about losing said clothes again before going back to bed to Michael, but doesn’t. Luke’s pause is too tense for that. “I just had to talk to her, and I think she needed to talk to me, too,” he says, a bit absentmindedly. “She’s more worried about Daryl than about dying.”

Michael closes his eyes, sighing. “If I could, I’d switch places with her. I’d love for him to forget about me.”

“Don’t say that,” Luke says, immediately, hand freezing on Michael’s head. “If he didn’t care about you, hadn’t searched for me all over the country, just because he knew I’d bring you to him, I wouldn’t have made it, never would have Jack. And then, who knows how long you’d be in that Prison, Michael?” he pauses. Michael sets his jaw, quiet, and Luke’s voice becomes gentler once more. “You don’t have to call him Dad. But he loves you. His love for you has saved me, and it’s saved you, too.”

This time, when he breathes out, it’s heavy and loud, tangling one of his legs between Luke’s, head still a little fuzzy from before, a bad angle suddenly making the piercing on his eyebrow hurt a bit. He shrugs. “Halsey, though.”

Luke takes a deep breath, and goes back to combing Michael’s hair back. “She’s losing her family all over again. There’s no way to make sure it doesn’t happen, so we have to at least make sure she has someone to put her back together when she falls apart.”

Michael raises his head with a cocked eyebrow. “Do you feel that responsible for all of your allies, Luke?” Luke stops, looks at him, like he’s been caught in a compromising position. Michael chuckles, still staring at him in the dark. “Because she’s not your friend, remember? Just your ally?”

“I do care about all the Champions, I’ll have you know,” Luke says, his hand sliding down Michael’s back, but he’s got a smile on his lips.

“Yeah, my next question was whether you stopped by Caleb’s room too to ask if he needed a hug,” Michael teases, tilting his head to the side.

Luke stares at him.

Michael laughs, properly laughs, wrapping his arms around him and, in the process, dropping his weight on him a bit. Luke doesn’t seem to mind, only takes him, Michael kissing his mouth lazily and without purpose, and just because he can.

* * *

Waking up the second time feels different, like he’s finally slept, and all the time before that, when they were at the motel, when they were on the road, even the first half of the night when they got to Death Valley, it all feels like just make-believe, and this is the actual first time Michael’s slept in months, maybe all year. Because before Luke, before the Order Prison, much longer before he was arrested, things were okay, but they weren’t.

They never felt just right.

Something was always wrong, he just didn’t know it was war unfolding right under his nose.

“Morning,” he says, quietly, turning to Luke.

Luke yawns, groans, turns his back to Michael and covers his face with the thin blanket. Michael chuckles, decides against arguing for him to wake up and instead wraps his arms around him tight. It feels as if his heart will drum out of his chest, but it’s not a bad feeling at all. He presses a trail of kisses up Luke’s spine, from the middle of his back all the way to where his hairline starts. He sighs contently, feeling one of Luke’s hands intertwine with his, but he still seems decided to keep on sleeping.

Michael looks up instead, past the broken windows and at the fireflies. It looks almost the same as last night, only somehow brighter. Michael can’t explain the difference exactly. It’s like Death Valley is perpetually covered in artificial sunlight, only it gets impossibly brighter when it’s the morning.

“Should we, like, do something?” Michael asks, a bit shyly.

Luke finally turns back to him, blinking away sleepiness with a small smile. “Do you want to do something?” he says, and before Michael can ponder that, he answers the first question: “We don’t _have_ to, but we could. At night we’re going to have to be there for the dinner and the Head Champion announcement anyway, so we might as well do something that doesn’t make us want to throw up during the day,” he shrugs.

He still looks so sleepy. Cuddly. Michael feels his heart sink.

He really does love him.

Michael smiles. “Alright. I’m going to take a shower, then.”

Luke nods, and buries his face back in the pillow.

* * *

The shower is quick and alien. It feels like he’s living someone else’s life, with a probably-but-as-of-yet-undiscussed-titled boyfriend sleeping on his bed, just enjoying the hot stream of water washing away all the sleepiness. There’s no more blood licking down his legs, or dirt, or desperation. Somehow, the latter has morphed into something both deeper and lighter to carry, but it isn’t on the surface anymore. On the surface, it’s that life that belongs to somebody else, and he’s stealing it for a while.

He’d read about imposter syndrome in school, in psychology class. It’s when someone doesn’t believe to be worthy of the place they are in life, or of what they have. Michael chuckles lowly to himself, washing his hair with shampoo and not cheap soap for the first time in months, thinking that he must be hitting a new low if now, from all times, is when he has imposter syndrome. All that he has is a hot shower and granted fifteen minutes of peace.

If he’s honest with himself, it does feel like he doesn’t deserve that much. Surely the families and friends of the men he killed don’t think he deserves that much.

The thought makes a shadow pass his face, and then he’s shaking his head, turning off the shower, stepping out of it with his head feeling suddenly heavy. He’s not going to go down that path, not when he’s awake, not when things don’t look so bad anymore. He’ll have to learn to deal with all these new things, all the constant new information being fed to him by pieces, but still, things aren’t so bad. This is the calm, before a storm he hopes is years and years away, even if his guts tell him to not be so optimistic.

By the time he returns to the bedroom, a towel around his waist and his hair wet but combed back, there’s no one else in the room. A few seconds go by, Michael standing in the middle of the room, holding his breath. His first thought is that Luke left him, and he’s all alone, even if he knows a few other Champions plus Geordie and Jack, and, of course, Daryl. He’s all alone, precisely because he knows these other people, and aside from Ashton, no one’s been consistently nice to him. His second thought, once he shakes his head and tells himself Luke wouldn’t leave him, had promised not to, is that someone’s taken Luke.

This time, it takes longer for him to convince himself it’s not the case.

Something agitates in his chest, and though he has some problem breathing, he has no problem going straight to the window, as if he could still catch a trace of Luke being dragged against his will through the streets of Death Valley, kicking and screaming. He doesn’t see that. He also doesn’t find anything that tells him that Luke was taken forcefully. The bed has been made. There’s something on top of Michael’s pillow.

And that’s when he convinces himself nobody took Luke. He takes a deep breath, then clears his throat, and takes the note in his hands. It’s a piece of paper, but the message isn’t written in pencil or pen. The words tear through the paper, as if they were made with a needle.

Michael half-smiles, touching the words carved to the paper with the pads of his thumbs like it’s something magical. In a way, he supposes he’s right. The note says that Luke’s waiting for him downstairs, with food.

Breathing normally again, Michael makes a mental list of things he needs to work on. They include breathing normally even in times of distress, not always assuming the worst, and not seeing ghosts in his dreams anymore.

The wardrobe is surprisingly okay.

Michael had sort of expected to find clothes he would never wear in that, all two sizes too big or too small, nothing that could fit or look anything but ridiculous. The clothes aren’t by any means amazing, but they’re all decent-looking, and best of all, clean. Michael picks a pair of jeans, a plain green T-shirt, a black hoodie that looks just a tiny bit bigger than him, and his pair of Converses that Luke stole in that convenience store a few days ago.

It feels like two lifetimes ago.

Leaving his room is leaving his bubble, because here in this corridor, with Daryl’s bedroom and office just a few feet away, he’s convinced he’s vulnerable and could be attacked. It’d be madness, Michael thinks, if anyone tried to hurt the son of their leader, their King. And yet, Michael keeps watching over his shoulder anxiously, until he’s downstairs, and then he sees Luke.

Luke has a bagel on his mouth, is carrying a brown paper bag, and smiling with his teeth sinking further into the piece of bread. Michael cocks his eyebrows, snorting in both surprise and amusement, and then he sees Ashton on his other side, smiling, too.

It’s the first time Michael sees Ashton without either the white uniform, his chest bare, or a curtain of blood all over it. He looks like a whole different person like this, with a dark blue sweater with the sleeves rolled back messily, his hair up in a tight bun, running shorts, and sneakers. He looks so normal, smiling brightly, that Michael thinks it must’ve been someone else to have sunk his fangs to the jugular of a man who’s hurt Michael so much, someone else who pulled all life out of the man with feral brutality, and black fur reddening, blood dripping down his or its jaw.

“Hey,” Michael says.

Both of them turn to Michael, and Luke’s face lights up. The way Luke looks at him makes him forget about the things he tells himself when he remembers the bad things he’s done. It’s so pure and genuine that it makes Michael’s heart sink, as he bites back a smile. Luke’s still biting onto that stupid bagel.

Ashton’s smile changes, becomes both smaller and stranger. “How did it go, yesterday?”

Michael knows what he means without having to ask. He shifts his weight to the other foot, runs his hand over his wet hair. “Well, Daryl didn’t threaten to kill anyone yet,” he says, and in his head, he adds: _Except for you, sort of._ “And has asked me what I think he should do about Luke.”

Luke finally takes a bite of his bagel, one hand holding the rest of it, the other the paper bag.

“And you said?” Ashton raises his eyebrows.

“That he should let us be together,” Michael answers, easily, like it’s a stupid question.

Ashton’s tone of voice is the same when he asks: “And what did he say to that?”

“Okay,” Michael shrugs. “He said okay.”

There’s a second of silence then, going between the three of us. Michael’s sure he should be overanalyzing last night, thinking about what to make of Daryl, what to make of Death Valley, but he’s seventeen and his boyfriend has crumbs all over his shirt, and he should be disgusted, he thinks, but it only makes him want to smile and slap it away. Maybe just a second before he kisses his cheek. Luke’s got that sleepiness from before vanished from his face, and he’s wearing clothes, to which Michael is both glad for, because they’re outside the bubble, and resentful of, because he’s still seventeen. He’s wearing a white T-shirt with the symbol of a snake eating its tail in red, a pair of skinnies, and combat boots. He looks fairly normal, too, but unlike Ashton, there’s that hint of maniac in his eyes that never leaves unless he’s talking sweet.

“Huh,” Ashton says, eventually.

Michael looks back at him, not really sure what they were talking about anymore, but nods, because it feels like he should, and it makes the frown disappear from Ashton’s face.

Finishing with the piece of his bagel, Luke says: “I got us some breakfast,” he raises the paper bag with a smile, and Michael smiles back. “Is it okay if we share it with Jack, though? Would that be alright?”

“Sure, of course,” he says.

Ashton sighs. “I’ll see you guys tonight, then,” he starts, and then trails off, like there’s something he’s not sure he’s supposed to say. Then he takes a deep breath, and seems to make up his mind. “Just a couple of hours before Harry gets here.”

There’s hope in his face, but fear in his voice.

It makes Michael hold his breath.

Luke, who knows best, Michael will have to trust that he does, gives Ashton a small smile. “Can’t wait to see him and Dennis, man,” Luke says, sounding as chipper as ever. “It’s been so long.”

“It’s been longer for me than for you,” Ashton remarks.

But he doesn’t sound bitter when he says it, just teasing. Luke still pauses, blinks a couple of times, looking suddenly lost and awkward, like he’d forgotten. Michael walks closer to Luke, bumping his shoulder to his boyfriend’s, and looking at Ashton, says: “You kind of raised him, didn’t you? Pretty sure he must think of you as more than a father than your actual father.”

“Yeah, kind of,” Ashton replies, that small smile coming back to his lips. “We don’t really… have a father, to be honest. I mean, we do, but he was someone who lived with Mum in the city and she never trusted to talk about Chaos, so when he found out, he left. Didn’t really tell on her or on us, though, which shows he’s not a total piece of crap. But he still left,” he cocks his eyebrow. “But yeah. Yeah, I mean, to what you said, about Harry and I. I do love him a lot.”

Michael smiles at him, nodding. He understands the father part, even if not really, even if no two cases can be the same. Luke still looks a little awkward next to him, taking another bite of his bagel, so Michael says: “I’ve always wanted to have a brother. Harry’s lucky to have you.”

All possible tension breaks with Ashton’s smile, big and bright.

Michael remembers Ashton having a sister, too, but figures Ashton’s feelings for his siblings must be very different. Although Mali-koa and Calum were close, he also can’t imagine either of them smiling so big at anyone saying one was lucky to have the other.

“Let’s go?” Luke asks him, finally, done with the second piece of bagel.

Michael smiles, and Ashton waves immediately, turning away from them and disappearing in the corridor where all the Champions have rooms. Michael presses his lips together, watching him go, but eventually turns back to Luke, nodding. They leave the house together, but Luke holds the door for Michael, which Michael thinks is too much, and too lame, but also sort of adorable, and to prove his point, he rolls his eyes, but slaps away the crumbs from his T-shirt, and presses his lips shaped into a smile to Luke’s cheek.

Luke smiles and takes another bite of his bagel.

Shaking his head, Michael lets Luke guide them to Jack’s laboratory.

They don’t talk all that much, because Michael’s mind is still tired and only sort of recovered from the dreams and the scare of not having Luke in the room when he left the shower, but he ends up asking Michael whether Harry stays in the house with the other Champions and Ashton. Luke tells him no, that children aren’t allowed in the house, so Harry’s never been there. Michael thinks this is funny, that they’re too young to be around Daryl and his Champions, and yet they seem to be old enough to go in missions. Michael considers telling Luke this, that if anything, Luke’s still seventeen and is just as much of a child as Harry is, minus the probable innocence and lack of blood, but still.

He decides against it.

Like in his dream, the weather feels good, and though if he looks up he sees the walls of the underground cave eventually embracing them, he bets the sky is clear and beautiful outside. He feels good, for once, bold enough to reach for Luke’s hand, and when Luke holds his hand with a small smile and the grip on the paper bag tightening in his other hand, Michael feels like maybe it doesn’t matter how old they are, or who gets to fight for what. Michael trusts that they’re okay.

Jack isn’t.

The second they get there, Michael feels it.

It’s not something in his face or in how he raises his eyes at them, with a small smile. It’s no bruise across his face or skin, it isn’t disorderly hair. On the outside, he looks just the same as he’d been before Caleb showed up yesterday, the hint of snark there, but mostly calm, mostly just happy to see Luke. But Michael feels it, wants to roll his eyes back just to be sure, but knows it’s there anyway. It’s the growing restlessness, something bigger, maybe worse.

Luke smiles as he walks in, holding Michael’s hand, raising the brown paper bag with the other.

“Ah, bagels?” Jack raises his eyebrows, raising his head now, too. His hands are still over one of his desks, two computers that don’t face them turned to Jack. His hand pauses on the mouse, the other still typing something, slower now. “I’d missed the proper breakfast way more than your ugly face.”

Luke snorts, mumbles: “Shut up.”

Luke goes straight to the table that looks less crowded, the one where a few wooden pieces lay without any apparent connection between them, like they’re there by mistake. One by one, Luke puts them on the floor, closest to the wall, so there’s space for them. There’s only one chair, the one Jack’s sitting on, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for Luke. He pulls himself up to sit on the table, and opens the paper bag, finally offering it to Michael.

Smiling quietly, Michael mimics him, and gets a bagel for himself. It’s still warm.

“Morning, Jack,” Michael clears his throat, and looks at Jack. His eyes have gone back to the screen, and he’s got a frown in his face, but Luke doesn’t seem to notice that. He’s taking another bite of his bagel, waiting for Jack to come join them, and Jack waves absentmindedly, raising his index finger, as if to say he’ll be there in a minute. “Luke,” Michael turns to him, lowers his voice. “You said there are people you wanted me to meet? Former Head Champions?”

Luke nods, contently. Michael assumes more because of the bagel than the subject.

“What do you think about inviting them over, so we can all have breakfast together?”

Luke’s face lights up. “That does sound like a good idea,” he says. “Jack loves them. And, I mean, it’s hard for Jack to love anyone,” he scoffs. Michael gives Luke a half-smile. “Hey, Jack?” Luke asks, climbing off the table. Jack’s probably heard them talking, but still Luke tells him: “I’m going to go get us some company, okay? I’ll be back soon.”

“Bring some chairs, where you’re at it, or steal it from close homes,” Jack says with a smirk, without taking his eyes off the two screens in front of him. They travel from one to the next like he’s watching a ping pong match.

Luke rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything to that. He takes a bagel with him, and without any warning, presses his lips to Michael’s quickly before he’s out of the door, moving fast like he’s afraid of sticking around for Michael to reconsider Luke kissing him.

Michael sort of thinks that’s nice, in a way that makes him want to chase him and kiss his neck and say again that he loves him, even though he’s only said it once so far. Doesn’t want to waste the phrase, is the thing. But then he’s alone with Jack, climbing off the table himself, taking the paper bag to Jack, offering it to him and staring until Jack finally stares back at him.

There’s so much trouble in those big baby blue eyes, that Michael can’t look away.

“Here,” Michael insists, nodding at the paper bag.

Jack takes one, snorts, and takes a bite. Michael stays there in front of the desk, in a position where it’s clear that he can’t see the computers, but he’s still close enough that he feels like he doesn’t need to whisper.

“Why isn’t Luke worried that Caleb hurt you?” he asks. Jack frowns, stares at him as if he’s insane, and chews on the bagel slowly. Michael shakes his head. “No, I don’t mean-- I mean after we left. You didn’t have the drug when we left. Then hours later, Caleb comes back and says that you have it. If it was my brother, I’d be here in a heartbeat, afraid the guy had beat you up.”

“I guess Luke just isn’t that type of brother,” Jack raises his shoulders in a shrug, with a mouthful of bagel. Michael doesn’t snort or roll his eyes or shake his head. He just stands there, looking at Jack, and eventually Jack rolls his eyes. “What do you care, anyway? Shouldn’t you be glad Luke’s not worried? That Daryl has the drug for his spies and everything’s okay?”

“I don’t think it is,” Michael says, slowly. “I think there’s something wrong.”

Jack cocks an eyebrow. “And I think Luke could’ve done better than you, but I don’t go around saying that, do I?” he asks.

And the thing about Jack, Michael thinks, is that he isn’t being mean. He’s terrified. The cloud that hovers above him and this laboratory isn’t natural. He can feel the intensity, the accelerated heartbeats, the smell of disaster and tragedy, all without rolling his eyes back. He can call it to him, like he could when he was younger. When it’s boiling up like this, he doesn’t even need to steady his breath.

Although he thinks he gets it, he asks: “Why do you think that?”

Jack narrows his eyes, bringing one of his hands down to his lap, holding that piece of bread like it’s essential for him. “You’re all the same,” he gestures at Michael with his free hand. “With your royal titles that are all bullshit. You’re not a prince. You’re a confused kid who has no clue what you’re walking into, and very soon you’ll have so much blood in your hands you won’t know who it was that you killed, and who killed you.”

Michael presses his lips together, and tries to keep his head clear.

“When you said you’re a prisoner, was that metaphorical, because you’re Chaos and the Order is always a step ahead, or do you mean--?”

“Do I look like a metaphorical prisoner?” Jack cuts him off, spreading both of his arms wide. The pastry stays on his lap, unaffected. Michael bites the insides of his cheeks. He’s quiet and standing very still, and he thinks maybe because of that, because Jack may mistake him for a piece of untalking unthinking unbreathing furniture, Jack continues: “It started because of you, of course,” he stares, accusingly. “Daryl found Luke and me. He was twelve, I was seventeen. Daryl wanted to start training Luke immediately, said that he could be his youngest Champion, that he’d be the most important there ever was, because he’d save his son, and bring the Chaos prince to _life_ ,” he raises both eyebrows for effect, then chuckles. “Guess that backfired a bit, don’t you think? Not quite what he had in mind, not at all,” he snorts. Michael’s still quiet, still furniture, and furniture don’t talk. “I saw right past his act of so-called kindness. I called him on it, said: what if Luke doesn’t want to help? He’s just a kid. He can’t have his hand on guns so soon,” he frowns, looking down again. He takes the bagel back in his hands, takes a bite, and keeps talking with his mouth full. “He wasn’t having any of it, any of my rebellion, is how he put it. He gave us both presents. Luke, a room in his house, with the other Champions, and me, this,” he raises one of his hands, the one with the bracelet Michael had noticed yesterday.

Luke was twelve, Jack was seventeen.

Luke was a child, Jack was their age.

Michael takes a deep breath. “Does it inhibit your magick?”

“My magick isn’t powerful enough that it needs to be inhibited,” he says, with a quiet bitter smile, his eyes not meeting Michael’s. “This just keeps me from leaving. There’s poison in it, and retractable needles ready to sink into my skin. If I leave this house, I’m dead.”

“That’s not all,” Michael says.

It shocks him just as much as it shocks Jack, because it should be horrifying enough, it should make him stop and reconsider everything. It should make him shake Luke by the shoulders to stop stop stop please stop being grateful to Daryl, to stop feeling like he’s indebted to him, because Jack’s life means nothing to Daryl, nothing more than working hands in a laboratory that he’s confined to. But this is something Luke could’ve easily told him. It feels like Jack’s stalling him, going around the question that was asked at first. The question that Jack very clearly wants to answer, otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten to talking, but going a different direction tells Michael he probably doesn’t think he should go there, doesn’t think he should tell Michael.

But Michael wants to know just as much as Jack wants to say it.

Jack considers him for a second, looks at him, face very serious and tilted slightly to the side. Then he looks over Michael’s shoulder, as if to check Luke’s still not back, but he won’t be back for a while, no matter how close the home of the former Head Champions is.

“I’d had the drug all along,” he says. “Caleb probably knew it, too. It changes people’s eye color when they roll their eyes back. It’s always made Chaos witches infiltrate the Order, but only Daryl knows who exactly. They had a supplier, a human who worked in Order laboratories, but they were killed when the Order found out. Humans haven’t had much luck getting jobs in well-respected Order laboratories since,” he chuckles, like that’s amusing to him. “They needed me,” he says. “They do. And I got their drug, all right. For now, I gave them the right substance. But I don’t think I will always do that, because, you know, substance abuse is a problem, and I wouldn’t want to contribute to any addictions.” he smirks.

Michael stops, frowns. “You don’t care about these spies dying?”

Suddenly, as if he’s just been offended greatly, Jack snaps. He narrows his eyes and tilts his chin up, challengingly. “I’ll trade all of their lives for Luke’s safety. I’ll let the whole world burn down if I can get Luke out first. Don’t you fool yourself for one second thinking Daryl letting Luke live when Halsey couldn’t do it has anything to do with you. He told her to do it, because he knew she couldn’t, and so he’d have an excuse for naming someone else his Head Champion, someone less emotional who’ll play along to his rules unquestioningly. And the only reason he’s still alive even now is because of _me_.” He hits his chest with his open palm when he says the last word. Michael holds his breath, and Jack holds his gaze, raising his eyebrows. “They need me because I’m the only one in this whole city who can cook up bombs, and in war, everything needs to go up in flames. But most importantly, Daryl needs me, because without the eye drug, his highest ranks will be found out, and then _everyone_ dies.”

Shifting his weight to the other foot, Michael takes a step back. He frowns, feeling suddenly nauseous, and with his voice small and affected, he asks him: “So what’s your plan, exactly? Try to convince Luke to take off with you when you give Daryl a fake drug?”

Jack takes a deep breath, like this is wasted time.

Maybe it is.

“My plan is keeping my brother alive at all costs, and at the moment, I have leverage for that,” he says. And then, something Michael’s already heard before, something that had come from Tati’s mouth, only slightly different: “I’d rather have all of Chaos dying than Luke.”

Michael pauses, looking at him.

Jack takes another bite from his bagel, and gives Michael an uneasy smile. Only it isn’t directed at Michael, but at the people behind him. Turning around, Michael sees Luke walk into the room, all smiles, and two identical men, with neck and arms covered in tattoos. One of them immediately waves at Michael, the other seems to not even have seen him, looking at Jack and going: “Oh, no, tell me you’re actually working on something interesting and not just playing some dumb game online again,” he teases.

Rolling his eyes, Jack says, “Fuck off, Benji, I’m not a geek.”

“You’re an engineer and a hacker. I beg to differ,” Benji snorts, crossing his arms. Then his eyes fall on Michael, and he gives him the tiniest and most polite of smiles. “Luke was very excited to introduce us. I’m Benji,” he offer his hand.

Michael shakes it, and then Joel’s, when he introduces himself, too, but his legs are still weak and his head is all fuzzy. If Jack’s uneasiness is anything to go by, he’d bet on Luke knowing about the drug, but not knowing the extents of his bluff, or possibly not a bluff. He’d say Luke has a vague idea of much Jack’s work is important, but would bet all his currently inexistent money on Luke not knowing about the threats Jack’s probably already thrown to Daryl’s face.

Rebellious, Daryl had told him. Just like Michael was.

Only, it was different.

The only reason Luke is still alive, Jack had said, was because of him, not Michael.

The words ring too loud in Michael’s head for him to pay attention to anything else.


	20. there's a place inside my mind you'll never find

The breakfast in itself isn’t bad, Michael thinks, it’s just that he can’t focus. 

Benji and Joel are both around their thirties, with tattoos peeking from under the collars of their shirts, arms sleeved in colorful ink. They notice Michael staring at their tattoos, Benji explaining quickly that tattoos are like birthmarks you choose for yourself, but that are unique; not even shapeshifters can take your ink if they take your face. 

They talk loudly, and so do Luke and Jack, and in twenty minutes Michael hasn’t said anything but hello and his name, while they all talk about people Michael has only heard the names of: Annika, Nate, both supposed to come today from missions, Jason and Diana, both humans who have lived in the village up Death Valley all their lives, and even Caleb, they mention him, too. They keep it light, though, don’t mention the death, don’t mention the blood, and Michael’s too stunned by Jack’s quick change of moods to take notice of that, or pay attention to their conversation at all, so he just keeps eating bagels without anything to drink, thinking of the things Jack had said.

Daryl knew Halsey couldn’t do it. He knew she couldn’t do it, and that was why he told her to.

It makes him grimace, looking down.

Joel touches his arm. The word Chaos is written up the side of his index finger in faded grey ink. “You okay there, buddy?”

Michael blinks a couple of times, looking at him. He realizes everyone is looking at him.

Forcing a smile, he nods, but still says nothing. Luke tilts his head to the side, looking at him, and though Jack looks away abruptly, Benji narrows his eyes, somehow looking both suspicious and sympathetic at once. Benji presses his lips together, and as his twin brother parts his lips to talk again, letting go of Michael’s arm reluctantly, Benji cuts him off, saying, louder than before:

“He’s bored out of his mind. What does he care that Annika shaved her head, that Nate finally got inked, that Diana stole a Mercedes or that Jason looks more ripped than ever?” he snorts. Joel laughs, Luke does too, even if it’s just to be polite, and then Benji’s eyes fall on Michael again, almost kindly. Almost almost almost. “Alright. Tell me and Joel about you.”

Michael swallows the rest of his bagel a little dryly.

Jack’s staring at him now almost challengingly, and Luke’s expression has gone soft again. He knows Benji means well, but being put on the spot like this makes him pause. What is he supposed to say? Is this where he talks about his mother (Order) and his father (Chaos) and how he’s neither? Is this where he says he’s still thinking about what Jack said before they came in? Is this where he just bullshits his way through?

“I’m not bored,” he argues. “Just curious as to why on Earth anyone would tattoo wings when they can’t fly, but,” he shrugs. 

Joel laughs, shrugging. “Look, Nate probably wishes he was born Order just so he’d have those damn wings. But they look sick, I think, even though it was a lame choice for a first tattoo,” he says. “I inked it myself,” he raises his eyebrows, looking smug. “Took us a while, because Nate is so _weak_ with pain,” Joel stares, their cue to laugh. Luke nods vehemently, and Jack just snorts, shaking his head. Michael doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t know Nate. “And like, it’s a massive tattoo, covers all his back, so he was whining all the time,” Joel rolls his eyes.

Benji rolls his eyes at how easily Joel goes off a tangent, but Luke and Jack seem both amused to just hear Joel talk. Maybe it’s just that the spell doesn’t work on either Benji or Michael because Benji’s known Joel for too long, and Michael for too little.

“Anyway,” Benji starts again, looking at Michael. “Who are you, Michael?”

Michael parts his lips, then closes them again.

“I’m sure you heard about the prophecy,” he offers, shrugging, and snorts, too.

Benji nods, but he’s smiling a weird unimpressed smile. “Yeah, but that’s bullshit,” he lifts his shoulders. “I don’t care about what you’ve been prophesized to do, or who are your parents,” he cocks an eyebrow, still staring. Michael feels his throat a little dry, and then comes the inevitable question: “Who are _you_ , really?”

Who is he, really?

Michael looks at him, this former Head Champion, this Chaos warrior, covered in ink and snakebite piercings. Benji doesn’t break eye-contact, and it eventually becomes too unbearable, and Michael has to look down. 

Joel slaps the back of Benji’s head.

“ _Ouch_!” he hisses, glaring at his brother. “What was that for?!” 

But Joel just gives him a disapproving look. “Don’t make him uncomfortable with your existential crisis inducing questions,” he states, matter-of-factly, as if his word used to be the law, and somehow still is. Benji cocks an eyebrow and stares back at him, and that little bit of apprehensiveness is gone from Benji’s face when Joel cracks a smile. 

It ends up making Michael smile too, but he’s still pausing, unsure.

They’re all sitting on the floor, the only two remaining bagels between them over a towel. It would be too much for them to all sit on tables, with only one chair available, so it was an easy decision that they all should eat on the floor. Michael’s sitting next to Luke, cross-legged and with his knee touching Luke’s thigh, Jack to Luke’s other side, Joel between Jack and Benji, and Benji sitting more or less in front of Michael.

Luke must sense his reticence somehow, reaches for his hand, and it’s different. It’s one thing for them to reach for each other under tables and in the dark of barely illuminated back seats. This is for everyone to see, Luke taking Michael’s hand from his lap and nesting it between his palms, giving Michael a small smile, and when Michael feels his cheeks blush, Luke leans in closer, and pecks his lips.

It’s quick and brief, like something that wasn’t supposed to happen but did, and though it leaves Luke smiling and still keeping Michael’s hand between his, Michael feels like he could burst.

“Don’t you hate love?” Benji sighs, sounding annoyed and just the slightest bit entertained. “It’s disgusting, I reckon.”

It makes the situation in Michael’s cheeks worsen. He turns to Benji, parts his lips, but Joel lets out an exasperated sigh, ignoring Michael’s desperation, and tells his brother: “I’m going to tell Cameron that you feel that way about love.”

Benji’s eyes widen, and he blinks a couple of times. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“He would,” Jack adds, unimpressed.

“She’s going to give me the silent treatment and call me an asshole,” Benji tells Joel, raising his eyebrows, as if that changes everything. It only makes Joel shrug. Benji sighs heavily, rolls his eyes. “Fine. Have it your way. Ruin my relationship. Your kids like me better anyway.”

Not offended, Joel laughs. And Michael does, too, because even though he doesn’t know Cameron or Joel’s kids, or even the fact that he had one, let alone plural -- which feels weird, he thinks, knowing they’re Chaos and still manage to have families -- they still make him feel like he’s part of something. Not feeling as embarrassed anymore, he squeezes Luke’s hand in his, and leans back against his boyfriend, until his head is resting on his shoulder.

“I don’t think I know how to answer to that, to what you said before,” Michael says.

It makes him pause, press his lips together, keeps holding Luke’s hand back. This was the chance to let it go, and he couldn’t. Jack looks at Joel for guidance immediately, but Joel’s quiet, leaving this one for his brother. Benji gives Michael a tiny smile, and sighs softly.

“You don’t know who you are,” he half-states, half-asks. Michael nods, feeling his cheeks burn, but still he doesn’t feel threatened, not with his cheek smooshed against Luke’s shoulder. Benji nods, understanding, and elaborates: “You are every decision you make, and all the ones you don’t. You are how you react to the things that happen to you, because nothing from the outside can shape what’s on the inside, not really. You are your knee-jerk reaction,” he says. And then: “You are everyone you lost, and everyone you couldn’t possibly bear to lose.”

It’s going too far, maybe, the way Benji says it.

There’s something about his voice that tells Michael, before anyone else does, that Benji’s got history. It doesn’t surprise him, not really, not with the Chaos that vibrates through him and would make it obvious to everyone else just who he is. But he still presses his lips together, because Luke squeezes his hand too tight, probably not even meaning to, and he knows he’s one of those people Luke can’t bear to lose, just like Luke is for him. 

Only, for Luke, he thinks the list is too long. Luke is everyone he lost, and all the rest of the world, because he couldn’t possibly bear to lose anyone else.

Michael feels his throat a little dry, blinking a couple of times, and Jack gives Luke one brief look before he’s looking away. Joel starts saying something, but closes his mouth. Benji notices it, turns to his brother, and there’s certain defiance in the way he cocks one eyebrow that has been tattooed around to make it arch higher.

“Don’t,” Benji says, even if his eyes dare him to.

Joel sighs, looking away. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” he defends himself, but he’s lying. He was going to, and it makes everyone in the room a bit too self-conscious, and maybe especially Luke, because he doesn’t seem to understand that sometimes people lie just because the truth isn’t good enough. Eventually, though, because Benji won’t look away, Joel says: “I’m your person, alright? And I ain’t leaving.”

Benji snorts, and it sounds like something between fondness and disdain. 

Michael supposes having siblings is both simpler and more complicated than he thinks.

“Whatever, that wasn’t what you were going to say,” Benji says, matter-of-factly, and then he looks back at Michael. “That’s what you gotta figure out, is what I was saying. You figure out who you can’t lose, and who you’ve already lost, and you’re halfway there.”

Joel sighs, and then Jack sighs, and they both start saying something at the same time, but Jack blushes and looks down, letting Joel speak first. “Hey, don’t worry too much about it. Benji just gets… philosophical or something. Must be because his wife is making him sleep on the couch.”

The teasing back, Benji rolls his eyes dramatically, and snorts, but doesn’t say Joel’s wrong. Michael supposes that’s Cameron, his wife, and it makes him smile a bit, suddenly timid, that _even though_ they’re Chaos, they still have all the family problems stripped of War that everyone’s supposed to have. It makes him feel a little hopeful, somehow, feel good and bad at the same time, and he’s not sure why. 

Luke lets go of Michael’s hands to get another bagel for himself, but is careful enough that Michael doesn’t have to put any distance between them as Luke reaches for the bread. Michael does anyway, straightens himself with a deep breath.

“Um, Luke,” he says, tugging at his shirt, even though he probably didn’t need to. Luke hums to show he’s listening, frowning at the bagels as he chooses his favorites. “You and Jack probably have lots of catching up to do, right?” 

“Yes,” Jack answers immediately, before Luke can, but he doesn’t seem to mean it to be evil. He’s smirking a bit, like he’s both challenging Michael to try to steal his brother for longer, and saying thanks that he won’t.

Michael smirks back at him, like this is their private joke.

Jack has no idea.

Ignoring his brother, Luke turns to Michael. First he takes a bite off the bagel, priorities clear, and with a mouthful of bread, he asks: “Are you sure? You don’t have to be alone.”

“I want to take a walk, if that’s okay,” he shrugs, gesturing dismissively. 

“Hey, if you’re going back to the Big House, I’ll come with,” Joel says. “There’s something I need, and Benji’s going to tattoo a friend all morning anyway, so you can help me carry the things, right?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.

“The things,” Michael repeats. Joel just nods, and if that’s all Michael needs to know.

It’s set, then. Jack gives him one last look, one last reminder of what they’ve talked about before, and it feels weird, like this secret that was never meant to be kept builds something, or rather, starts ticking. It’s a bomb. Michael knows, and Jack knows, and he thinks though Luke and Benji and Joel don’t know, they still feel it. They have to. It’s loud.

Luke entertains himself with the last bagel, and Michael’s raising his eyebrows with a vague smile, about to ask how come he can eat _so much_ , and then Joel’s putting his arm around Michael’s shoulders to lead him out, waving dismissively to Benji when Benji snorts at him for something Michael didn’t catch, because he was trying to read the look Jack gave him when Joel came closer to him. He’d cocked an eyebrow, the mischief gone for a second, and then, just like that, his face was back to normal.

“There’s something your old man owes me,” Joel tells him, with an easy smile.

Michael looks at him curiously.

* * *

As soon as they’re outside, Joel has questions for him.

Joel wants to know if it’s true that in the city everyone knows how to read and do math, and how many oceans are there. He wants to know at how old children learn to read, and what schools are like, and what is it exactly that you have to do to become a teacher. He wants to know what types of career you can have that involve art, and if it’s true that some people paint for a living, or draw, or make music, or write books. He wants to know what are Michael’s favorite fiction books, and doesn’t lose his excitement when Michael apologizes and says he’s never read much. Joel has more questions. He wants to know if Michael’s ever painted, and if paintings in oil look like 3D, and if there are still amusement parks, and if Michael’s ever been to one, and how is it, and how about roller coasters? He wants to know about pets, too, and if they learn to love you like you’d inevitably end up loving them. He wants to know how real wedding ceremonies are, and if it’s true that are ceremonies for graduations of school periods, and what universities look like. He wants to know if there are twins in the city, if there are Order twins, and that’s the only time he mentions Order at all.

Though Michael feels like none of his answers are satisfactory enough, Joel doesn’t seem to agree, always raising his eyebrows with interest even to Michael’s pauses and reticences and countless, “Uh”s. 

When he asks about twins, though, Michael actually stops walking. He frowns, gives Joel a look. “Is that why you didn’t ask any of this while we were back there? Because of your brother?”

Joel gives him a sheepish smile, shrugging. “Benji isn’t really interested. But that’s okay,” he gestures dismissively, as if shoving away the topic, too. “So. Are there twins in the city?”

“Uh,” Michael says, again, and considers this. He frowns, shaking his head no. “I don’t think I ever met any before you two. I mean, I’d known about it, because we study that kind of thing in biology class. But it may be a Chaos thing?” he offers, shrugging, unsure. He doesn’t add out loud: _like any other biologic anomaly._

For a second there, Joel’s face falls. It lasts about a second, before he takes a deep breath, and forces a smile back onto his face. “Biology, you said? What else do you study in biology?” 

Michael gives him a small smile, can’t help it, thinks that maybe the spell is catching on him, too, and with that in mind, he passes Joel’s question, stating, matter-of-factly: “Jack was giving you a look.”

Blinking a couple of times, Joel stops, raises an eyebrow. “When?”

“All the time,” he shrugs. They’ve both stopped now, but it seems to still be early enough that most people are asleep in their houses. All the houses nearest to them have the windows and doors closed, at least, and there’s no one else in sight. Michael doesn’t really care to know what time it is exactly, though. “Did you two ever…?” 

At first, Joel just stares at him, like the question is coming in an awkward language he hasn’t figured out yet, and then his face changes, he wrinkles his nose, shakes his head vehemently. “God, no, what the hell? Jack’s just a kid.” 

Benji stares at him, and Joel sighs, shrugging.

“Well, I guess he’s an adult now, but when I first met him he was a kid. It’d be _sick_ ,” he states, carefully but also firmly, and Michael’s under the impression it’s the first time anyone’s ever brought it up, which puzzles him. Half hour with them, and it was so painfully obvious to Michael. “Plus I have Nic. I’ve always had Nic,” he adds the last sentence looking away from Michael, and he can see his face light up a bit, the color coming back to his cheeks, probably biting back a smile.

Because Joel doesn’t make him feel on the edge like so many do, Michael takes a step closer, touches his arm, making Joel look at him again. “I’m sorry I asked. I probably imagined it. Alright?”

“Yeah, probably,” Joel says, slowly, raising his shoulders in a shrug, like he’s letting it go, although he may still find it weird that Michael asked. “Did you imagine anything else that you want to check before we get back to walking?” he gestures in the general direction of the house, with raised eyebrows. 

Michael half-smiles. He didn’t imagine it.

“Nah, let’s go,” Michael says, and starts walking. Joel parts his lips, and Michael’s sure another question about the city is coming, so a question rolls out of his tongue before he has any time to think about it: “How come you know so little about the city? Weren’t you a Head Champion for years?”

Walking by his side and keeping his head forward, Joel nods. “Different times, though. It was rare for Chaos witches to go to the city unless they were Order-born spies,” he sighs softly, then: “We had different battles to fight, in different places.”

Michael considers this. Back then, at least five years ago, Halsey was probably a child, but training to be a warrior, a Champion. Luke was already one if he was already in Death Valley, and then there were Benji and Joel, probably Head Champions since they were Michael’s age, or even younger. Michael has a feeling that Daryl wouldn’t easily change Head Champions unless he absolutely needed to.

Instead of asking what were the battles they fought, he asks: “Why did you and Benji leave?”

“Nic got pregnant,” he says. “My wife was a Champion, too, probably far more skilled than Benji and I together. She didn’t want to expose our daughter to the outside world and war, though, and I agreed. Benji was tired, too, I guess after everything, he just didn’t want to fight anymore. By the time we decided to have a baby, he was probably thankful he had an excuse to leave too.”

Michael snorts. He can’t help it.

It makes Joel give him a curious look. 

“What is it?”

“Is that your cryptic way of telling me that I did _not_ imagine the tension back there, between you and him? That something did happen?” he raises his eyebrows. Joel smirks up at him, then shrugs, as if he’s leaving it to Michael to decide whether he wants to know. Michael does. Of course he does. He rolls his eyes, and bumps his shoulder to Joel’s, who, even though has easily ten years on him, is still about his height.

Joel chuckles lowly, and then scratches the back of his head. They make a turn, and Joel slows his steps, so Michael does, too. Michael looks up at the fireflies in their version of the sky. He misses clouds. How dumb is it to miss clouds?

“We all became Champions more or less at the same time,” Joel starts. “Nicole was the most skilled, Benji was the bravest, I guess you could say I was the luckiest,” he smiles, and Michael smiles too, like a mirror. Not sure about the luckiest, but maybe the most genuinely charming, and Michael could see why Daryl would want that in a leader. “There were others, too, right when we started, people who were there before, people who came later. But then there was Tony, and he was the wildest,” he pauses. 

Michael frowns, staring down. The ground underneath his feet is full of tiny little rocks. If he focuses on them, listening is easier, too. He knows what the pause means, before Joel goes there. Knows what sort of story to expect before Joel clears his throat and takes another deep breath.

“The thing about Tony, is that he was unpredictable. He was the only one among us who ever gave Daryl a headache, questioning everything, always wanting to know more than we were told. If he hadn’t been so out of control, maybe Benji and I would’ve never been in charge at all. He was just that good. At everything, I think, Tony was just good at everything,” he pauses a second time. This time, Michael thinks maybe he won’t continue it, will drop it, and Michael wouldn’t insist. It makes him feel nervous anyway, waiting when he thinks he can see how the story unfolds. But then Joel chuckles, sounding fonder this time, and adds, as an afterthought: “Nicole and I started dating when we were still teenagers. Nobody would approve, because if you’re a Champion, you’re not supposed to care for another Champion on such a personal level. It makes you not be all that dependable, you know?” he raises his eyebrows, looking at Michael for the first time since he started talking about this. Michael nods, even though he does not know. “I couldn’t help it. I just… she’s everything,” he sinks his teeth on his bottom lip, looking away again. “I fell in love with her. And I couldn’t help what I felt and eventually she felt it too, and we both couldn’t stop _us_ from happening, even if we told no one. We were safer that way, I think, not telling a soul, because then people still trusted us when we were fighting.”

Michael sets his jaw, looking ahead again. “Benji fell for Tony, didn’t he?”

“He did. Couldn’t help it any more than I could help it that I fell for Nic,” Joel snorts, like he resents them both, like they were inconsequent and irresponsible. Which they were, probably, but Michael would still feel inconsequent and irresponsible himself even if they weren’t. “Tony had that quality about him, like you see only every now and then. His eyes were maniac blue.”

Stopping abruptly, Michael almost stumbles. 

Michael turns to Joel, frowning deeply, and his voice sounds a little desperate when he says: “Don’t repeat that. Please. Don’t use that word.”

Regarding him with a little confusion, Joel searches his face, seems to search his own head for the word that could’ve made Michael freeze. He ends up nodding, hesitantly, not understanding but not demanding any explanation that Michael can’t give. It’s just that he knows where this is going, and maniac blue-eyed Tony can’t take someone else’s shape in his head.

“Well,” Joel takes a deep breath, and Michael gives him an apologetic smile, but still doesn’t move to go back to walking. “There was this Vulture team, once,” he states, and this time he’s looking Michael in the eye, and he doesn’t know whether that’s better or worse. “We found a Chaos village way west, and we were trying to take them to Death Valley, but the Vultures came first. So much death, so much blood,” Joel presses his lips together, then seems to swallow. He breathes out heavily, shakes his head. “We didn’t get there in time to save anyone. We did get there in time to see the Vultures, though.”

“I’ve learned to like the birds so much more,” Michael jokes lamely, but it makes Joel smile.

“I didn’t... “ he starts again, frowning, and his eyes well up. Michael feels a lump in his throat, and then Joel talks again, and it gets worse. “I didn’t know what to do. They had Benji. They were going to take him to the Order Prison.”

Michael presses his lips together, sealing them shut.

He can feel his own eyes burning, but tells himself these are not his tears to cry; these are ten year old tears that belong to people who were there at the time. Joel’s tears, that roll very timidly over his cheeks, and when he wipes them off like they were never there, Joel tries again.

“I couldn’t let them take my brother. Now, my family is bigger -- I have Nicole and the children too, and I’m very grateful for that --, but at the time, Benji was all I had. Nic and I had only started dating, we were unsure about each other, about whether we’d die for each other, which is something you have to consider when you’re a Champion, when weighing the pros and cons of living is a daily routine,” he shrugs. Michael nods, again, to signal understanding, even if it’s false. He doesn’t understand it at all. “I’d rather die than live in a world where I was all alone, and if Benji was taken, I’d be all alone,” he justifies, reasons with Michael, and Michael finds himself nodding again, vehemently this time, because maybe this is something he gets. This is selfishness. This is familiar. “So I told Tony he had to save Benji.”

Michael blinks up at him. “If you couldn’t, why could Tony?”

“Tony had this thing about him,” he looks up, away from Michael, tearing up again, the guilt crushing his shoulders down. “His magick was special, rare, underdeveloped but still amazing,” he meets Michael’s eyes again, smiling. “I told Tony to turn himself in, in exchange for Benji.”

He parts his lips, a little shocked.

But he understands.

God, he understands.

“You see,” Joel says, chuckling lowly once more, a bit desperate and a bit plainly sad. “I told my brother’s boyfriend he had to die for my brother to live. And maybe I could’ve fought to death for his life, for their lives, if I was that powerful, but I wasn’t even that brave, and there was a whole army of them, and they all wanted Tony, and all Tony wanted was for Benji to live,” he shrugs again, this time the tears coming more violently. He shuts his eyes for a second, swallows it all down, and when he opens his eyes again, he’s telling Michael, matter-of-factly and eerily calm: “I kissed my knuckles and knocked Benji out. It was the only way to make him come, if he wasn’t conscious. He kicked and screamed and wanted to find a way to save Tony, too. But Tony was a wildcard, and if he decided he was sacrificing himself for the boy he loved, then that’s what he was doing,” he laughs, quiet and fond, sad and guilty. “So I dragged Benji out of that village that still smelled like death, and never saw Tony again.”

In a naive impulse, he blurts out: “Maybe he’s still alive.”

Joel snorts quietly, shaking his head. “He isn’t.”

They stare at each other for a second, the words sinking in, and Michael wants to cry so badly. He wants to cry because the person Benji loved when he was Michael’s age died to save him, and because he had maniac blue eyes. He wants to cry because it hits too close to home, and because he doesn’t want to think of the implications, and he never wants anyone to ever die again. He wants to cry because of the dead in that Chaos village that didn’t make it, and because he was a young child in an Order village at the time, who had no idea of what was going on, and thought Chaos was evil by default, just as Order was fair and just.

Mostly, he just wants to cry because it’s so fucking sad.

Instead, he blinks a couple of times, looking away from Joel’s eyes, and asks: “Why did the Order want him so much, anyway?”

Snorting loudly this time, definitely annoyed, not at Michael but at the world they live in, Joel gestures ahead for them to be back to walking, and a little unwillingly, a little like their feet are suddenly heavier and they’re trying to move with angry ocean water to their chests, they start walking again. Joel shakes his head a couple of times before speaking, like the topic still angers him too much, even after all this time.

“It was the humans, actually. Well, sort of? The war was starting to die down, and the Order had pacts with most of the humans. They wanted to replicate some of the Chaos magick, but got betrayed in the end, most of the Chaos witches they captured stolen away. They had laboratories all over the city, but nobody knew exactly where, because Order always trusted humans to not be in their way, to not be clever enough. That was before they started trying to make drugs that could develop magick in humans. Absolute bullshit that went nowhere, of course, but Tony was in that batch. I know, because we had spies there in the Prison, and Tony never made it; humans got a hold of him and whoever else was with him first. It was a fucking mess, is what it was.”

Michael frowns, looking at him. “They wanted to replicate Chaos magick,” Michael repeats, and then, thinking out loud: “And Tony’s magick was rare.” He feels his heart sinking, something strange crawling up his spine, that is neither fear nor panic, but is maybe their lovechild. “What was Tony’s magick, Joel?”

Joel sighs, looking at him.

With a tone of finality, he tells Michael: “Mind control. Would you believe that?”

Michael would.


	21. and if you gaze long enough into an abyss...

He’s never been a particular fan of stuffed animals; there’s something eerie about anything that has a pair of eyes but won’t look back at you. Michael always preferred little cars for toys, so Karen indulged him. She let him bring the cars everywhere, even when money was still tight and they lived in the village. Even a quick walk to a friend’s house was an excuse for Michael to display his collection of four vintage-looking car toys with a smug look on his face as he passed other kids. In his head, they all stared at him, impressed, amused, both fearing and admiring.

Michael’s seven. He’s got a lot of place in his head for car toys and self-importance.

The walk isn’t long, but Michael loves it. They pass tall trees and small houses, people talking obnoxiously loudly, kids playing, older than him, younger than him. Michael loves the village, loves Karen’s hand on his shoulder as she keeps walking with a distracted look on her face, loves how this old man rolls his eyes in white and makes things flutter around him to make little kids giggle.

Michael never learned his name, but he’s known him from school. He touches something or the other for children a little older than him. Now, as it usually is, he’s sitting cross-legged on a rock, with children sprawled on the ground around him, watching it as he smirks up at them with white eyes, and moving his hands swiftly, flowers dance in the air.

Everyone’s smiling and laughing quietly, watching the show, all except for one little girl.

Michael blinks a couple of times, and drops one of his four cars. Once one is down, and he looks down at it, all the other three fall down, too. He frowns, staring at the mess around his feet, and he feels something, like a whisper in his ear, only not by any human voice, but by the wind. It makes him look up immediately, just in time to see the girl who looked terrified at the old man’s tricks. She holds eye-contact with Michael for just a second before she lowers her eyes to her lap again, looking as panicked as she had before.

“Mike? Do you need help?” Karen asks, kneeling beside him with a worried look.

He looks between her mother and the girl, parting his lips. He shrugs, not quite sure how to voice his concerns, and kneels too, but to pick up his car toys. Karen helps him pick up the cars, but hums in understanding, like she knows what’s on Michael’s mind.

“She’s a human refugee, baby,” she says, softly. “Isn’t used to magick and witches, probably. The people in the village are just trying to make her comfortable until someone takes her to the city, where she can be with her kind.”

Michael’s got two little cars in his hands, one black, one white. Karen’s got the blue and red ones. He doesn’t like sharing, but for her he’d make an exception.

Staring intently at the cars in his hands, he presses his lips together, trying to weigh his thoughts. But he’s seven, and seven year olds aren’t very good at that. He ends up asking her, without looking up or thinking twice: “Why’s she here, then, if we’re not her kind?”

Considering this, she pauses. She waits until Michael looks at her, and when he meets her eyes, there’s certain finality to her words, like she’s repeating what’s been repeated to her a thousand times before:

“It’s complicated. Humans aren’t as intelligent or resourceful as us. Because they aren’t organized, they die easily. Their society has always been fragile, weak. Some of them are good enough to have very nice jobs in the city, but they’re the minority. Mostly, they’re just good enough to serve us,” she shrugs, like this is Michael’s cue to understand, so he nods, even if he doesn’t, not really, understand it. Karen adds: “Don’t feel bad for them, though. It’s not your fault they are the way they are.”

Michael shakes his head slowly, looking down. “That’s not… that’s not what I was thinking, Mummy,” he says.

Curiosity lighting up her face, Karen tilts her head to the side with a small smile. “What was it?”

He meets her eyes again, the frown back to his face.

“What if they get tired of being weak and not good enough?”

Disconcerted, Karen stares at her seven year old son, her smile faltering. Then she clears her throat a little awkwardly, shaking her head. Back on her feet, she hands Michael the two car toys she picked from the ground for him, and she snorts.

“We trust them to not be that smart. Don’t you worry about that, either.”

* * *

The house is quiet when they walk in. By the time Joel and Michael make it there, Joel’s already explained that, since he used to be a Champion, and a Head Champion at that, he was promised to never have any of his loved ones hungry, and he came to collect. It’s been rough since the village up was attacked, so much agriculture they depended on just gone, but Joel, as he said, had two children to feed -- one in Death Valley, one who should be coming by midday, and yes, along with Ashton’s brother Harry, how did Michael know about Harry? -- and he didn’t care that he had to steal. A deal was a deal, he said.

“I’m just coming for my prize,” he mentions, matter-of-factly, when Michael smirks up at him.

“Can you do it without me?” Michael asks. When Joel raises his eyebrows questioningly, like he isn’t even sure what Michael’s talking about, he elaborates: “Truth is I’m tired, and I just need to sleep a little. That’s why I asked if it was okay for me to take a walk. But if you really do need my help carrying the food out and to your place--”

Joel gestures for him to stop. Michael raises his eyebrows with a small smile at the sudden rudeness, from the little Michael’s known of Joel, very unlike him.

“Look, I could tell you to not give me this shit, that I know you’re not just going to take a nap,” he starts, already walking towards what Luke assumes is the kitchen, down the corridor of the Champion rooms are, “but let’s be real: I never needed your help anyway. I just needed to know a little bit about the city. So you don’t tell on me, and I won’t tell on you,” he winks.

Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, and chuckles.

“Hey, Joel?”

“Yeah?”

“Why do you care so much about the city and the things that happen there anyway? I get the curiosity for something that is different, but you were just… fascinated,” he pauses, raises his eyebrows. “And in reality? It’s just a place.”

Joel gives him a funny look, both amused and suspicious. “But it’s the place we’re all owed. Me, you, my kids. Everyone.”

Michael can’t help his little smile.

“I suppose you’re right, Joel.”

There’s a tiny second there, Joel narrowing his eyes and looking at Michael in a way as if he could read him, that Michael feels like he’s being tested, and more than that, passing a test. An odd sense of pride washes through him, and even though it’s not polite, he wants to ask what is Joel’s magick, just so he can be sure he’s not a mind reader. Not that he’s ever heard of such thing being possible, but then again, before Luke, before Tony, he also wasn’t aware anyone could be capable of controlling someone else’s mind.

Then the look is gone, and the corner of Joel’s mouth curves up. He waves Michael goodbye, absentminded and quiet, and Michael watches him until he disappears in the corridor.

Going up the stairs two at a time, he realizes his problem when he sees all the closed door. There’s only one door he wants to be opening, the door to his room, to maybe actually do as he’s told Joel at first and sleep. Maybe take a shower first, go back to under the sheets in only his underwear, brace the pillow that still has Luke’s scent in it, and let sleepiness take away the all the weight of Jack telling him about Daryl, of Joel telling him about Joel. Part of him only wants to forget about everything.

Then there are the two doors he needs to knock on, and that’s independently of what he wants to do. Because part of him, the bigger part of him, knows that if he can’t forget, then he can’t ignore it, either.

Taking a deep breath, he sets his jaw, staring ahead.

His steps feel weird and heavy, like he’s still trying to move but the world has comfortably set pace in slow-motion and he’s trying to go against it. He keeps going, anyway, taking deep breaths and frowning harder each step, like he’s fighting himself in the process. He is, to an extent, he thinks, and Michael thinks that if Benji is right, and if his knee-jerk reaction is who he is, then it probably says something about him that he takes one look at Halsey’s closed door and knows that the first door he needs to be looking at isn’t hers or his, but the one to Daryl’s office.

The moment the realization comes to him, is the moment he feels like the world goes back to normal. All the clocks adjust everywhere, and nothing feels dragged anymore, not even his steps. He knows what he has to do, what he needs to, regardless of what he wants.

Instead of knocking, he opens the double doors, one hand on each doorknob.

Here’s how Michael had imagined it would go down, in the milliseconds it took for him to decided that he would, and actually storming into his father’s office: Daryl sitting behind his desk, perhaps with a cigar between his fingers, though Michael’s not sure he smokes at all. He’d maybe be going through his papers again, like he had when Michael got there only yesterday. Maybe he’d been typing furiously on his computer. Maybe he’d be passionately kissing someone and Michael would have one more thing to accuse him of, though Michael’s not quite sure what that would be, either.

But Daryl’s not there at all.

That doesn’t mean Michael’s alone in Daryl’s office, though.

There’s a woman, definitely older than Michael, but younger than Joel and Benji. Her hair is short and brown, her skin a sick gray tone, and her eyes are big and round. She’d been wandering around the room, but when Michael makes his entrance, she locks her eyes with his for a long moment.

Michael feels his expression soften at the surprise, and then frown again at the look in her eyes.

She looks absolutely horrified that Michael saw her.

He parts his lips, the question about to roll out of his tongue, and then she closes her eyes.

They roll back black. Obviously.

Michael’s nostrils flare and he takes a step back, unsure on how to fight someone so suddenly, and he’s painfully aware that this time, for the first time since the Order Prison, he’s all alone. Who he is is his knee-jerk reaction, and his knee-jerk reaction is freezing and biting the insides of his cheeks, clenching his fists.

She doesn’t seem willing to attack him, though. That much is clear when, with her eyes rolled back black, her grey skin seems to expand, translucent and then transparent. It would be beautiful, Michael thinks, if it wasn’t so terrifying to watch. Unlike Caleb, who’d gone from completely invisible to visible for Michael to see, this woman doesn’t quite make it to invisibility. It’s just that the cells in her body seem to detach from each other, like she’s disintegrating. Michael watches as, in seconds, her gray skin becomes nothing, raging clashing cells that seem to become gas and float up. By the time Michael snaps out of it and shakes his head with widened eyes, she’s coming his way.

Michael couldn’t put into words what happens next.

It’s too fast to take proper notice, and he can’t register that she’s coming, that her eyes are still black, and that’s the only part of her that looks solid enough, and even then, it’s still a mirage, a hallucination, something blurry that flickers like bad light. Michael holds his breath, bracing himself for the worst, grabbing the doorknobs like it’s the only thing keeping him on his feet, and then she’s moving past him.

The weirdest thought comes to him: it’s like he inhales her.

And then, just like that, just as abrupt and sudden, she’s turning away, or floating away, her shapeless body going entirely through the small sharp holes of the broken glass in the back of the office.

She runs away in the air, and Michael’s left there, blinking a couple of times, still holding the doorknobs of his father’s office so tightly that his knuckles turn white and hurt, but he still can’t make himself stop. For what feels like forever, he can’t even seem to come back down from the confusing and yet very convincing thought that he’s just imagined a dark gray witch becoming gas and disappearing from Daryl’s office.

But it was real.

Very briefly, not ready to go _there_ yet, he tells himself he’s convinced himself enough things weren’t real. This woman, at least, he won’t refuse his sanity the luxury of admitting to be real. Now what was her business in Daryl’s office is a whole other matter.

Tentatively, he walks into the room properly, lets go of the doors and closes them behind him, because it feels like the right thing to do. His head's still spinning, and he isn’t sure how come just the sight of a witch has affected him so much, but it has. He can’t even remember what her face looked like anymore, just the strange tone of her skin.

With a frown on his face, he takes a deep breath, and adds her existence to the pile of things he doesn’t understand, and has very little low expectations on understanding.

Michael goes straight to the desk, but his mind is so foggy.

The computer is password protected, but the papers are all scattered around, like Daryl left in a hurry. Michael looks at them, but they don’t make any sense to him. They’re a different language, Michael thinks, one he cannot read. No, not language, but code. It’s all code.

Michael presses his lips together. He should’ve told someone that he was about to confront Daryl. If someone had come with him, he’d have someone to show these papers to, ask if they make any more sense to a Chaos-born than to him.

He’s got his hand on the first drawer, locked with key, but he’s still stubborn in trying to get it to give and open anyway, when the door cracks, and he looks up. Daryl tilts his head to the side, looking at Michael, but other than that, his expression is blank.

“Looking for something?” he says, when Michael doesn’t say or do anything.

Taking a deep breath, Michael lets go of the drawer, and with his heart sinking with a heavy weight of incompetence, he leaves the papers on the desk, too, just as they were before, as he walks around it, and stops as far from Daryl as he can, but ready to make an exit for the door if things get too ugly. He isn’t sure how ugly they can get.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” he says, smirking up.

He’s nervous, hands shaking when he clenches his fists again, but Daryl doesn’t seem to notice it, and if Daryl doesn’t notice something, it’s like it’s not even real. Michael’s learned that much about the man and his control over Death Valley already. But Daryl doesn’t look threatened, or even all that worried that Michael was going through his things. Instead there’s a frown coming to his face, visible concern, but not the type Michael had been waiting for.

Michael blinks a couple of times, and his balance is a bit off, his spread palms reaching behind him for the desk so he doesn’t fall. Daryl takes quick steps his way, touches his shoulder, and Michael’s feeling too out of it to realize it’s the first time his father touches him.

“Son?” he asks, his voice muffled.

It’s not that it’s muffled. It’s distanced.

Michael blinks more, his head moving slowly, the fogginess in his head growing thicker and thicker until he screws his eyes shut. He moves one hand up to his head, his index finger pressing to his forehead, but he feels like his limbs aren’t his anymore, and the panic that builds in his throat at that, at that feeling of neither belonging nor deserving his body, it’s what he used to feel in the prison. It makes his legs weak.

Without warning, Daryl holds him in place. It takes Michael a second to realize it’s because Michael’s losing his balance again. His frown grows deeper, too, confused and disoriented, but when he focuses on Daryl, his eyes are wide and look a bit terrified. Michael’s never seen that look on the stoic man before.

“What happened to you?!” he asks, but it sounds like it’s just above a whisper.

Michael feels his eyelids heavy.

There was something. Something he needed to remember.

In that second where the whole world stills and his father’s holding him and looking into his eyes like there are no more lies, Michael feels his heartbeat speed up, and he parts his lips. His voice sounds harsh in his throat like it isn’t his either anymore, but everything comes to him at once.

He remembers everything. Every single thing he forced himself to forget.

In special, one thing. In special, more than what has just happened now, but what will happen next. He remembers everything, because he remembers the future.

Grabbing at Daryl’s biceps to steady himself, his voice sounds desperate when he forces it out of his mouth: “Don’t _let_ me forget,” he begs, and then he’s out of breath, like a panic attack is coming, and this time Luke isn’t there to look into his eyes and tell him to breathe.

That’s it, he thinks.

Luke has to be looking the person in the eye, and be vocal about his command.

But the thought is useless. He’s not sure he won’t forget that much as well.

And as Daryl frowns at him, Michael feels the grip of his fingers around Daryl’s arms loosen, and then his consciousness is slipping away. He hears Daryl’s voice, urgent, yelling his name, and then there’s nothing.

* * *

Death.

That’s the first thing in Michael’s mind when he comes to his senses, wrinkling his nose at the strong smell of something that makes his skin crawl. It’s like he’s smelling death itself, can’t be anything different, the smell far too peculiar to be anything else.

He blinks a couple of times, cross-eyed as he stares at something too close to his face and tries to back off. He’s sitting, though, so the latter is difficult. Instead he blinks his eyes into focus and normalness, sees it as someone takes away a glass of something. It’s Daryl’s hand, holding a petrol dark liquid. The color looks very much like the black in Chaos witches eyes when they roll back.

Daryl sighs, and for the first time, Michael hears his father swear: “Well, thank fuck.”

Michael and Daryl are not alone anymore. Halsey and Caleb are both in the office too.

The place looks different when the atmosphere is different too, like Daryl is powerful enough to change the whole environment with his moods. But that’s probably just Michael’s Order magick working its way back to him as consciousness does too, blinking a couple of times and frowning a bit, registering everything: Daryl, setting the glass on his desk to turn to Michael again, Halsey to Michael’s other side, looking as serious as she’s ever been, and Caleb, by the door, a whole different version that he hadn’t seen before, either. Not the bully, or the ass-kisser. A guard.

“Michael,” Daryl turns to him again, his voice annoyingly calm once more. “Did someone attack you before I came in?” he pauses, but it’s too short of a pause for Michael to reply. He adds: “Or did you drink or eat something? Could it possibly have been low-blood pressure? Do you suffer from that? Is there a blacking out condition I should know about?”

Michael just stares at him, wide-eyed.

When he gives Daryl no response, he grows impatient, turns to Halsey.

“Not that I know of,” Halsey says, clearing her throat. She’s suddenly older, and her hand stops on Michael’s shoulder, not quite reassuringly, but still there anyway. “While we were on the road, he never once passed out. There are the occasional panic attacks, but that’s probably because he was submitted to torture for six months.” Her voice is plain and blank of emotion, like she’s giving a report on Michael’s news. Michael turns to her, blinking a couple of times.

“Michael,” Daryl presses him, frowning, still keeping a respectable distance, but not enough for Michael to feel comfortable. “Was someone here before me? I’ll send Halsey and Caleb after them immediately. All you have to do is tell me what they looked like, and what they did to you.”

Michael frowns a little at him, parting his lips.

He closes his mouth almost immediately.

“I don’t… I don’t think so?” His frown grows deeper.

Daryl tilts his head to the side, and staring at Michael, he lets out a small: “Huh.”

Bringing his hands to his face, he rubs his eyes, yawns, feels his shoulders slumped and weird. He yawns into his hands once more, trying to shake off the strange fogginess in his head that starts to dissipate. Halsey squeezes his shoulder, and when he looks at her, he can tell, even though she says nothing, that she’s asking him if what he says is true. He nods, quiet and confused. She parts her lips, looking a little hurt, like she’s disappointed Michael wouldn’t trust her.

It’s not about that at all.

He has no idea what just happened.

“Caleb, Halsey, can you give me and my son a moment?” Daryl asks, voice suddenly soft, and a the same time his tone assertive, leaving no doubt as to whether that’s a suggestion or a command.

Caleb nods immediately, giving Michael one last glance as if to just make sure he’s unharmed, and then he’s out of the door. It’s Halsey who lingers, takes slow steps, and stops in front of Daryl. “Are you sure I shouldn’t tell Luke?”

“Not yet,” Daryl says. “It’s pointless, anyway, Michael’s safe with me now,” he adds, eloquent and confident of his words. Michael almost believes the words on spot, just based on how much Daryl seems to believe them himself. “If he chooses to, he can tell his boyfriend himself later.”

Boyfriend. The word makes Michael smirk a little, feeling defiant.

He parts his lips to say something, no doubt a witty obnoxious comment to confront Daryl, but then he meets Halsey’s eyes, the concern making her eyebrows knit together, and he remembers that until tonight happens, she’s still a Head Champion. He’s still her responsibility. And she can’t be happy that Daryl’s worried for him, even if he doesn’t understand why.

“Sorry,” he mouths to her.

It only seems to puzzle her more, but she nods, and turns to leave.

Daryl walks with her to the door, and closes it, taking a deep breath before turning to Michael again. Michael blinks a couple of times as if to situate himself, tell himself where he really is, and he remembers coming to Daryl’s office to confront him. He remembers Jack’s words, and Joel’s words, and how fucked up everything is. How sad. How much he’d wanted to cry but didn’t because they weren’t his tears to cry.

And he says: “I get what she meant, back then. You’re a monster for letting these things happen,” he says, muses out loud, and though Daryl may not know exactly what he’s talking about, he still seems to know enough, because he holds eye-contact with Michael for a few seconds before setting his jaw, and clearing his throat.

“Talking about allowing things to happen,” he starts, unusually chipper, forcibly so. “Would you please be so kind to explain why I walked into my office to find my son about to pass out in my arms, begging me to please not let him forget?” he cocks an eyebrow. Accusingly, Michael thinks.

Michael snorts. “What’s that supposed to mean?’

Daryl spreads his arms. “You tell me.”

They hold eye contact for a moment, and it’s strange. Everything about this is.

Daryl looks frustrated and aback, and Michael can’t tell if it’s an act or not. It occurs to him that he’s only known his father for two days, after all, and it makes his head heavy with regret, only he isn’t sure what is it that he regrets. He looks away, sitting on Daryl’s big leather chair, massages his temples with a long sigh, and though he thinks maybe the words aren’t completely foreign to him, they’re still not enough that Michael can make some sense of them.

Instead of dwelling on that, with his head thrown back and eyes focused on the ceiling, Michael says, matter-of-factly: “You knew Halsey couldn’t kill Luke, just as you knew Luke would get closer to me. You tormented her giving her the one task she couldn’t fulfill, tormented them both, and all because you needed a new Head Champion.”

There’s silence, after his words.

He’d sort of expected Daryl to snort at the audacity, say they’re all lies, but then again, he’d expected himself to feel much stronger and much angrier, but when he gets the words out, he just manages to sound disappointed. For him to be disappointed, Michael considers, he’d need to have some sort of expectation prior to being let down. He didn’t, he tells himself. Zero. Nada.

Of course it’s bullshit, but still he tells himself.

Michael opens his eyes, looks at Daryl again, this time their eyes locking.

Daryl raises his eyebrows slowly, carefully.

“What would you have done?”

The question startles him. What would he have done? Michael snorts, shakes his head, the constant reminder that he’s supposed to fill these shoes eventually too haunting. He presses his lips together and tires to push away all the thoughts that insist on coming back. “Not this,” is what he says, because it’s the truth, and anything further than that would be too wild speculation.

Daryl turns away from him, takes a chair from the other side of his desk, drags it so it’s in front of Michael. It’s not too close this time, and Michael feels weird, sitting on the bigger better chair with the leader of Chaos witches sitting across from him. There are still lines of worry around his eyes, worry about Michael losing conscience, worry about him. Michael doesn’t know what to do with that any more than he knows what to do with the newfound blankness that slowly threatens to take all expressions away from Daryl’s face.

Shifting uncomfortably on his seat, Michael can feel himself tamed, and recognizing it isn’t the same as stopping it.

“I refuse to lose her,” he explains, plainly.

But he must know that isn’t enough, otherwise he wouldn’t have sat down. He’s studying his son, no doubt assessing whether he deserves to be let in on the secrets that he hides, whichever are their nature. Michael sighs heavily, feeling a little defeated just by being there, by sitting quietly, by not making a fuzz, not kicking any doors down on his way in. Instead of voicing any of that, what he says is: “Elaborate,” and it comes between gritted teeth, like it’s the one defiance he won’t admit to losing.

Daryl cocks one eyebrow, staring at his son. “Head Champions die. Halsey won’t.” He pauses, briefly, examining Michael’s facial expressions, whatever he lets on that he’s not even aware of, and then Daryl continues, stoically: “Now that both you and Halsey are safe in Death Valley, the war must naturally evolve. This means more conflict, and leading those conflicts will be me, as a leader, and my Head Champion. We will very likely not make it out alive.”

Unimpressed, Michael tilts his head to the side.

“Of course, emotional abuse justified by the most selfless reasons. I’m touched,” he brings a hand to his chest, staring back.

Daryl snorts, smirks up at him. Michael doesn’t remember seeing him smirk before, either, but if he had, then definitely not as smugly as this. “Obviously, not that simple, but,” he rolls his eyes, and Michael thinks that’s a lot of emotion, for someone who hadn’t shown much. It makes him a bit proud of himself, but mostly, he just keeps staring back. “I know that you think I have ulterior motives, but that’s as honest as it gets: my Head Champion will most certainly die. Even if I make it, they won’t. And no matter what, when this war is over, Halsey still lives. So will you. This is why I need you two to stay in Death Valley.”

It’s Michael’s turn to snort, and the corner of his mouth goes up, even if it’s not a smile at all. “You just want someone easier to manipulate than her. That’s all you’re after: lackeys.”

Daryl narrows his eyes, and his voice becomes quieter.

“You don’t have to trust me. You just have to be logical. Does she seem to you like she’d question my orders? That girl would walk through fire if I told her to.”

“She shouldn’t have to,” Michael replies.

“And she won’t,” Daryl says, knee-jerk reaction and all. Michael narrows his eyes, too, trying to push aside in the process all the vibrant similarities between Daryl and him. Mostly, he just can’t bear the thought of being him, and that’s his knee-jerk reaction. Daryl’s is defending himself, and, as it seems, defending Halsey, too. “If I told her I need a disposable Head Champion, she wouldn’t accept it. She doesn’t believe she’s worthy of living any more than any other Chaos witch does.”

The lump in his throat becomes bigger.

He tries swallowing it down, it’s just that he can’t.

Michael shifts uncomfortably on his seat again, frowning, breaking eye-contact to stare down. He feels his heartbeat quicken. He sinks his teeth to his bottom lip and searches his head for holes in Daryl’s excuses, but there aren’t any he can find, not right now, under his insistent eyes that beg for trust.

“What’s coming,” he half-states, half-asks, voice still as down as his eyes.

“The end of everything,” Daryl answers, matter-of-factly. Michael raises his eyes to Daryl, and Daryl shrugs. “The beginning of something new, I suppose, too.”

“But you don’t think you’ll be here to experience it,” Michael notes. He can’t keep the edge off his voice, can’t make himself sound sympathetic, only sarcastic. “You worked so hard for your community to thrive, and when it finally does, you won’t be here to see it,” he laments, shrugging.

Daryl smiles quietly at him, chin tilted up. Michael can’t read the look in his eyes, but his unaffected tone of voice makes his attitude towards it clear enough. “Something has to happen to me for you to take my place. Death seems dramatic enough.”

Michael nods, mimicking Daryl’s calmness, and rests his elbows on his knees, coming a little closer to his father. His tone casual, he asks: “What if I kill you?”

The smile becomes a smirk.

Daryl shrugs. “Then I suppose I die either way.”

That hadn’t been what Michael was expecting, or even hoping for. What he’d been hoping for was some sort of explosion, Daryl showing signs of complete lack of control, because he could never trust someone as put-together as this. It’s what worries him most, Michael thinks, the eagerness to trust. He shouldn’t be like this, and he shakes his head just after he closes his eyes. The reason he came here first, before warning Halsey of the type of thing Daryl had been up to, was that he knew she wouldn’t trust him if he didn’t have more information about it, couldn’t explain Daryl’s motivations properly.

But in reality, the reason he came here first, is that he’s just as desperate for approval as he was when he first met Jack, hoping he can find someone to trust, when he hasn’t heard from Karen in months, aside from the healer lady in the Vulture attack on room 93. He trusts Luke, and to an extent, he trusts Halsey, Geordie, and Ashton too. But they’re all just people his age who know about as much as he does. Trusting a parent is different.

And it’s something he never had, not like this.

John was dead before he was born. He never had a father.

Michael looks away from Daryl, at the desk covered in papers. He takes a deep breath, breathing out in a way that makes a funny noise. “Now that your psychotic orders to have Halsey kill a childhood friend have been sorted,” he pauses, raises his eyebrows, talking to Daryl’s desk and not him. “What’s your real reason to be against Luke and me? You had to—”

“Luke and I,” Daryl corrects him, absentmindedly.

Glaring at him, it at least gets them to look at each other again. Staring this time, Michael sighs, and continues as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “You had to know that it was going to happen.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I knew that Luke wanted it to happen. I didn’t know you did too,” Daryl adds, with a bit of a frown, his nose just a bit wrinkled, just enough that it shows Michael just how much Daryl is opposed to their being together, in spite of what he said last night. For some reason, the thought makes him want to laugh.

“Is that because he’s a dude?” Michael raises his eyebrows, putting weight on the last word, as if to make it fall tangibly between them.

It doesn’t, Michael supposes, because Daryl gives him a look like Michael’s being a little off. “That’s not it,” he snorts. “My problem,” he starts, taking a deep breath, chest inflating, somehow becoming a lot bigger right across from Michael. “Is that this is damaged kid who’s spent half his life fantasizing about you, falling in love with a fantasy. No matter what he tells you, it’s not—you’ll end up getting hurt. He doesn’t know you, not the real you.”

Michael laughs quietly, shaking his head.

“Yeah? As opposed to what? How much _you_ know the real me?”

Daryl holds his gaze for a second, then sighs heavily, as if giving up.

“Be careful,” he says, eventually.

Michael shrugs. “It’s not with Luke I have to be careful.”

He stands up, ready to leave, and though Daryl says something, something about if Michael remembers whatever it is that made him black out, Daryl would help him in any way he can, but Michael’s not listening anymore. He’s made up his mind about leaving the office, making his dramatic exit since he didn’t get the chance of making a dramatic entrance, or not one anyone could see, anyway.

When he’d walked into Daryl’s office before, the room was empty.

* * *


	22. we were younger then

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [this](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/132504257125/halseytrees-when-opia-by-witchmikey-becomes) and [this](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/132954685575/blackwaterlilies-these-are-the-badlands-we) happened. wowowowowo. i cannot believe you guys are so fucking talented and amazing :') thank you so much for everything. you guys rock. big time.

The thing about going back to his room is that it feels a lot like admitting to failure. 

He drops on his bed and wraps his arms around the pillow, sighing against it. He frowns and closes his eyes, tries to forget how long the morning’s been, the things that he’s learned and the things that he still hasn’t. He’s not sure what is it that he’d hoped Daryl would tell him, but protecting Halsey wasn’t it. Michael weighs the memories in his head, feels like there’s a piece to the puzzle missing but can’t focus too hard on that. What he has to think about, he decides, isn’t what his mind is telling him he doesn’t know, but whether to believe on the things he does.

Michael opens his eyes, lets his gaze wander around the room, and he stops on the broken glass of his window, the sharp edges, the foggy transparency of the glass. It feels a little like looking inside of himself, staring at that window. It gives him a headache, looking at it, so he looks away, a bit disoriented and confused, but mostly just sleepy.

When he wakes up again, from a quite dreamless -- but, to be fair, also nightmare-less -- sleep, it’s with Luke’s hand on his face, stroking him gently, a whisper of: “Mikey?” that makes him smile into his pillow before he turns to look at him.

His mouth shapes into a smile, blinking slowly at his boyfriend, and Luke smiles back at him, his knee-jerk reaction full of mirrored smiles and and leaning down to press his lips against Michael’s. Luke’s sitting on the back, and Michael’s vaguely aware that he’s probably slept through lunch, but he still doesn’t want to get up just yet, so instead of letting Luke say anything, he just grunts and closes his eyes again, wrapping his arms around Luke to try and bring him down back to the bed.

Luke’s bigger than him, and unsurprisingly, stronger. He doesn’t even flinch, but he smirks, looking at Michael, until Michael sighs heavily and makes a frustrated face, one of his arms lacing around Luke’s waist, his head dropping to Luke’s thigh, the second best thing.

Combing Michael’s long hair through his fingers, Luke sighs softly, and says: “Had a good time?”

“I need to tell you something,” Michael says, his voice just above a whisper, and Luke raises his eyebrows with a humming sound, but he’s taking it lightly, still more focused on Michael’s hair than in his words. Michael forces his eyes open against the clarity, turns to look at him. “Luke. It’s serious.”

Nodding slowly, like he’s snapping out of it, Luke blinks a couple of times, and retrieves his hand from Michael’s hair. Michael sort of leans into the touch, missing it even before it’s gone, and the thought alone makes him bite back a smile. Luke gives him a look, like he’s something sacred and amusing at once, and Michael feels his cheeks blush. It’s so annoying to blush over something like that. They are _together_ for fuck’s sake.

Rolling his eyes and shaking his head, Michael puts some distance between them, and sits cross-legged across from Luke. Luke pulls his legs up too, if anything to match him, and Michael’s not sure whether that’s intentional or not, but he sort of thinks it’s adorable maybe. Luke looks so intent on being serious, that it makes Michael mad at Daryl for assuming Luke’s feelings for him may not be real, or directed at an unreal version of himself instead.

Fuck Daryl. He may not know what it’s like to be looked at like this.

Michael doesn’t even blame him that much. He didn’t know until very recently.

“It’s about what Ashton saw,” Michael starts, because he doesn’t know how else to start. Luke blinks a couple of time, realization washing away any trace of playfulness from his face, and he sets his jaw. Michael frowns, looking away from him. “I mean, not exactly what Ashton saw, but… you know. It’s about your magick. Not your Chaos magick. Your…”

“Human magick?” Luke suggests, raising his eyebrows. 

It’s an attempt at a lame joke, but it still sounds bitter, like he may not have gotten the type of power that may come from the magick itself, like it’s just another scar that won’t go away from what happened to him. It makes Michael pause, too, reach for Luke’s hand just because he can and thinks he should, and playing with his fingers, staring at how pale he looks even in comparison to Luke, he tells him:

“Joel told me about Benji and Tony. Did you know Tony?”

“No, he’d already… He wasn’t around anymore when Daryl took Jack and I to Death Valley,” he says, slowly, carefully. Michael gives him a look, as if hoping he’ll fill in the blanks himself, but Luke doesn’t seem to dare to. “What about him,” he lets out, but it’s really a murmur and not a question.

Michael chews the inside of his mouth for a second before he lets go, and squeezes Luke’s hand again. “Joel said it was the Order who captured Tony, but there was something wrong. For some reason, humans were able to steal the Chaos witches from the Order--”

“Witches? Plural?” Luke asks, quietly, his eyes on his hand between Michael’s.

“He didn’t know for sure, but made it sound that way. There may have been others, other types of magick the Order was interested in, but the humans were the ones who ended up trying to develop into drugs so they could have a fighting chance,” Michael lifts his shoulders in a shrug that he gives up midway, not sure which part is the one he should feel bad about. “Tony’s magick was mind control, Luke.”

Luke raises his eyebrows, but his heart’s not in it. 

There’s a second of pause, then.

Eventually, Luke tells him: “Joel and Benji both helped raise me. Jack was our age, he wasn’t… He wasn’t fit for raising a child. Nicole helped, but she was always the busiest, even though Joel and Benji were the ones who were Head Champions. Benji especially, he was,” Luke stops himself, shrugs. Michael notes: that’s the part he’s supposed to feel worse about. “Benji was just very important to me growing up. And I knew about Tony. Everyone did. For years and years before Cameron came back to Death Valley, all Benji did was mourn him.”

“It’s not your fault he’s dead,” Michael tries, squeezing Luke’s hand.

Luke meets his eyes, finally. Michael’s a little surprised that he’s not tearing up. He doesn’t look devastated, just sad. “I know. But in a way, I’m still taking advantage of his death.”

Michael cocks an eyebrow. “Yes, because going through all you did was your own choice.”

“Sort of,” Luke says, matching Michael’s unimpressed expression. But he still doesn’t let go of Michael’s hand. His voice lowers when he speaks next, quieter but still somehow firmer: “Jack didn’t always have the bracelet. About two years after we came to Death Valley, a spy in the city let Daryl know the drug was ready. The humans had it, but the Order knew that the pill was ready, too. So I don’t know. I was like fourteen? I’d been training for a while. Daryl let me go with Jack, but we weren’t supposed to intercept the drug, is the thing,” Luke raises one of his eyebrows, tilting his head to the side, looking suddenly mischievous and playful again. Michael snorts, giving him a look. “Daryl gave us permission to go on a food scavenging little trip, but Jack knew where the drug was, and wanted to play hero-- I mean, I don’t blame him, or anything. I wanted my shot at playing hero, too.”

“But the Order found you,” Michael contributes, just as quietly.

Luke nods. “Yeah, I mean, it wasn’t that difficult taking it from the humans. I didn’t even do anything, just hid in the car and waited for Jack and Ashton to take the pill from the car where the humans were,” he trails off, frowning a bit, like the memory is weird for him.

“Ashton was there?” Michael asks.

Nodding again, like it’s an unimportant detail, he continues. “Dylan was, too. But it was all Jack’s idea and plan. Everyone went back to the car and Jack had this tiny little box in his hand, and we were all so happy. We all had different reasons to be happy. I think Jack thought that was going to be some sort of freedom pill, like we gave it to Daryl and he’d let us go. Jack never liked the idea of being in Death Valley very much; only Joel could talk him out of running away, those two first years,” Luke presses his lips together, catches his piercing between his teeth for a second, then lets it go. “Dylan wanted to be sent on a spy mission, had been training all his life for that. Their parents did the same as Anne, Ashton’s mother, had. They were in the City, and I think Dylan just missed them. Ashton, I think, just wanted to be wherever Dylan was, even if he didn’t really want to let go of Harry yet. They’d prove that they were trustworthy enough to be in serious missions if they got the pill for Chaos, even if it was to never be used, just so it could never be used against us.”

Michael’s index finger traces the outline of every finger in Luke’s hand, and then the veins in the back of his hand. “And you? Why were you happy that you’d stolen the pill?”

“Just wanted to give back,” he shrugs. “I like Death Valley. Before Death Valley, even before Mum and Dad died, we were always running, always scared of someone finding out we were Chaos. Ben was the worst, I think, he was so paranoid all the time, and when they killed Dad, it just got worse. No place would be safe enough, nowhere to call home for more than ten days. In Death Valley, I had a proper bedroom,” he shrugs again, his cheeks pink. Michael smiles quietly, nodding, 

“Was your room always here?” Michael gestures with his free hand to his own room, but meaning the house. Luke nods.

“Yeah,” Luke half-smiles, like the memory was once good, and now it’s just strange. “Then I don’t know. It was,” Luke frowns, staring down, “the Order came along. It was a Vulture team, of course,” he rolls his eyes. “They came after Jack first, because he seemed like the oldest, but I think he was just the angriest. Ashton and Dylan went separate ways, because they were smart, but I was fourteen and didn’t want to lose my brother, so I went after him. When they got to Jack… Jack just shoved the little box my way. I think he wanted me to run further away with it, and I tried to. But when I saw them catch Jack, there was no point in getting away, was there? I took the drug so they couldn’t have it. I let them catch me because there was no point fighting it.”

Michael enlaces his fingers with Luke’s.

He’s heard the story before, the abridged version. But then, Jack was just a name, Luke was just a stranger, and he didn’t feel his stomach doing flips. Now, things are different. Everything is.

“I’m so sorry this happened.”

“Me too,” Luke gives him a weak little smile, then adds: “But Ashton and Dylan made it back to Death Valley, and they told Daryl. Your father didn’t let us die, Michael. He tracked us down, found us, and brought us both back to Death Valley in one piece. It was all him, Michael. It was all Daryl,” Luke says, slowly; the gratitude obvious in his voice. 

It makes Michael raise his eyebrows.

“I assume this is why Jack got that bracelet,” Michael snorts. 

Luke nods vehemently and slowly. 

“When I came back, the first person who hugged me was Benji. Before even Jack, because he was too sick and drained from staying with the Order, even if it wasn’t that long,” he looks away from Michael once more, rolls his piercing between his teeth for a second. “He hugged me real tight. He started crying, too. I was too tired to cry, but he kept crying and hugging me and telling me that I wasn’t allowed to die.”

“You’re not,” Michael tells him, smiling at him sheepishly.

“Noted,” Luke replies with a small smile.

“I didn’t… I didn’t tell you about it because I wanted you to relive any of it. I told you about it because, if you trust Joel and Benji, I think you should tell them. I think they could help you control it, because it probably works just like it did with Tony, right?”

Luke’s face falls. He parts his lips.

“I trust them, Mikey. But I don’t… I don’t know if I want to even think about mind control, let alone discuss it with the people who’d be hurt the most by that,” he says.

Michael blinks a couple of times, and the argument dies in his throat.

“Well… whatever you think is best, then.”

There’s a second where they just look at each other, then. Michael can tell that Luke’s thoughts are starting to spiral out of control, and he’s so, so sorry. That’s not what he meant to happen at all. He clears his throat, blinks a couple of times as if it could erase the blurring in Luke’s vision instead, and moving in the bed taking Luke’s hands, he makes it so his back is against the solid hard headboard, and he’s pulling Luke toward him.

Luke chuckles lowly, still a bit disoriented but still willing to go wherever Michael takes him. Michael spreads his legs, and Luke sits between them, sighing softly when his back nestles on Michael’s chest, both of his arms going to Michael’s legs as Michael combs through his hair with one hand, the other stopping at Luke’s chest.

“I’m sorry I told you about it,” Michael says, quietly.

Again, his boyfriend chuckles. “Don’t. I’m glad you trust me.”

“More than anyone else,” Michael replies, and moves down to kiss the top of Luke’s head. Luke hums contently and his hands star-fish on Michael’s thighs, so Michael doesn’t add the rest, that though it’s true that he does, that he trusts Luke more than anyone else, there are still some things he needs to figure out on his own before he involves anyone else.

Namely, whether he should trust Daryl too.

“So it seems to me,” Michael starts again, frowning, “that everyone got what they wanted out of the drug thing, even though everyone thought it was a failure. Everyone except Jack. Dylan and Ashton both got their spy missions in the City, you _gave back_ so to speak, and Jack was the only one who was really punished.” He pauses, waiting for Luke to correct him, but he doesn’t. Still, he presses: “Isn’t that right?”

“I love him very, very much, but Jack can be difficult,” is all Luke offers him.

Michael doesn’t press for more.

He learns that he’s missed lunch, but that Luke saved him a plate and he can eat later, if he’s not hungry now -- he isn’t, not particularly, still feels like he’s recovering from a head injury, but it may be just sleeping too much. The food scavenging party returned, Luke tells him: Ashton’s little brother, the oldest of Joel’s kids, and four other children. Michael’s glad for Ashton, glad for Joel, glad for the four other families that were on the edge until they had their little loved ones back, but it doesn’t catch his attention much, with his eyes focused on the ceiling as runs his fingers absentmindedly through Luke’s blond hair, his shoulders and back already aching a bit from the hard angle against the headboard.

Pressing his lips together, he sighs softly.

Luke adds, like it somehow connects, just an afterthought: “Something came up. We won’t have a new Head Champion for at least another two days.”

Michael frowns, retrieving his hands, and Luke eventually looks up at him.

“That means Halsey’s safe for at least another two days. Why don’t you sound happy about it?”

“Because,” Luke starts, then stops himself, shrugging. “I don’t know, okay? It just sounds like something bad. Two of the best Champions were there, Nathan and Annika. Then suddenly he calls Daryl and says they had an emergency, and need another couple of days. Daryl’s worried, couldn’t make out half of what Nate said. Halsey thinks someone attacked Annika. I just don’t know what to think.”

Ultimately, the names mean nothing to Michael.

But he looks at Luke and the concern making him frown, and that does mean something to him. “I thought you were only close to Halsey, Ashton and Dylan, out of the Champions.”

“It’s not that simple,” Luke says, relaxing against him once more, sighing softly. Of course it isn’t, like nothing ever is. “We’re family. All of us. It’s fucked up more often than not, but if one of us goes down, we all pay the price.”

“With how everyone seems to be concerned there’ll be attacks against Halsey it sure doesn’t sound like many people would be paying the price if she went down,” Michael snorts, bitter. It takes him a moment to realize he’s bitter at strangers and names he can’t put faces to, because of her, because of Halsey. It also seems to take a moment for Luke to process that, too.

“Caleb is a self-righteous dick. Annika is calculating and dangerous. Nate is a lot more violent than any of us. But we all have our flaws,” he shrugs, as if that explains any possibly attempt against Halsey’s life. Michael cocks an eyebrow, unbelieving, but says nothing. Luke resumes talking. “Halsey is worried for Annika and Nate, too. Ashton said something, after Daryl left, something about if they don’t turn up after these two days, we should go after them. Caleb, of course, was opposed, and said we should never disobey Daryl, so that resulted in a half hour long argument I didn’t really take any part on,” Luke shrugs, casually.

“Would you want to go after them?” 

“Before, yes,” he answers, easily. “But that was before I could lose you, and now I just don’t want to risk it,” he says, catching one of Michael’s hands from his shoulder, enlacing his fingers with Michael’s, quietly. Michael feels his cheeks blush, and bites the insides of his cheeks. “They’ll go anyway, I think, even if I choose to stay.”

In his head, he says that Daryl won’t like it if Halsey leaves.

Out loud, he asks: “You’re seven, then? You, Halsey, Ashton, Dylan, Caleb, and these two people who should be here tonight but won’t.”

Luke hesitates.

“I don’t… we don’t know for sure. When Champions go on missions like Dylan’s and even Ashton’s, they stop being accounted for. Their fight becomes a different fight. They’re still Champions, but… not really. They’re Sleepers, you know?” he tilts his head to the side, playing with Michael’s hand, tracing the veins on the back of Michael’s hand. “They’re fully conscious of course, but they’re not in the battlefield like we are. Ashton’s sister, Lauren, she was a Champion once, now she’s a Sleeper. She has her life in the City, and she’s Chaos through and through, helping us in any way she can, and when war explodes for real, she’ll abandon everything she built there and join us. But for now, not much of a Champion, not at all. It’s just different.”

“So technically, there were five of you, then, and now that Ashton’s back, six?”

Luke nods. “We don’t know about all the spies in the City, though, just the ones we grew up with. Only Daryl knows how many spies he’s got in the City, how many allies, how many humans he can count on, too.”

They’re silent for another moment, one that seems to expand until it’s filling all the room, so much silence there’s not nearly enough space for both of them. 

So Luke lets go of his hand and turns around, giving him a funny look, the mischief that hadn’t been there for the seriousness of their talk back. “There’s something I haven’t told you today yet, but it’s very true, and should be said every single day.”

Michael smirks at the glint of playfulness in Luke’s eyes. 

Raising an eyebrow smugly, Michael asks him: “Is it that you love me?”

Luke rolls his eyes, dropping his head. “You’re so unimaginative,” he snorts, and when their eyes connect again, Michael’s full-on grinning, looking at him. Luke licks his lips. “I was going to say you look so delicious I could eat you up.”

Widening his eyes with laughter building in his throat, Luke drops on top of him again, biting his shoulder over the fabric of his shirt. Michael laughs, hissing and slapping Luke’s shoulder. Luke looks at him with a content and somehow innocent smile on his lips, resting his chin on Michael’s recently abused shoulder.

Wrapping an arm around him, Michael looks at him closely.

“You need some serious work in your dirty talk.”

Luke tilts his head to the side just a tiny little bit, looking coy.

“Who said that was my dirty talk? I was talking about eating you up. Haven’t even started on eating you _out_ yet,” he winks, smirking.

Michael raises his eyebrows high, and parts his lips.

Giggles erupt from Luke’s throat, and Michael rolls his eyes, but still melts into him anyway, using the upper-hand of his position to push Luke down against the mattress, and rolling on top of him, Michael kisses his whole face, from his cheeks to his forehead and the tip of his nose and his chin and jawline. And when he kisses Luke’s mouth, it’s the only thing that stops Luke from laughing, and then Luke’s serious and combing his fingers through Michael’s hair, kissing his mouth like it’s something sacred.

It makes Michael’s skin burn, the way Luke always kisses him.

When he backs off, looking at his boyfriend with an unabashedly fond smile, Luke looks past his face and to his hair, now both fingers going down the length of the mess of faded colors.

“I need to get it cut,” Michael comments, a bit self-conscious.

Luke blinks a couple of times, like he doesn’t know what Michael means, and then it clicks for him, and he says: “Alright. We can go to Joel’s for dinner.” 

Michael doesn’t ask, just nods, and kisses him again.

* * *

The next few hours feel like vacation, and Michael catches himself thinking of all the things he’d do so the next years of his life feel like vacation as well. Luke and Michael sneak out of their room even though no one would stop them, and the way downstairs to the kitchen is full of stolen glances and kisses and pulling the other closer, even if it’s just to get a giggle out of it. 

They reheat the food in an old looking stove, talk in whispers about the dumbest things, but the soup tastes good and makes Michael warm inside. Luke tilting his head to the side and smiling at him also makes him feel warm inside.

After that, they wash the dishes they used so there’ll be no sign they were there at all, and without seeing anyone, they sneak back into their room -- Michael’s sure he’s supposed to think of it as his bedroom, but it isn’t. It’s theirs. Luke had wanted a room so badly when he was younger, now they can have one. Together. 

Michael was never one for sharing, but with Luke, he’ll share everything. 

This whole broken empire, if they let Michael have it.

Luke tells him everything, plus a thousand other things, when they’re hanging out after, lying lazily in bed, exchanging memories and the most random thoughts. Luke tells him about how he used to share a room with Halsey when he was young, and that they’d always sleep together, but never _like that_ , because Luke was in love with a promise, and Halsey was in love with Death Valley. Luke tells him there are no televisions here, but they always entertain each other with stories -- tells him there are people in there, Benji included, who could maybe make a living of storytelling if the circumstances were different. He tells Michael that the only computers available are the ones in Jack’s laboratory, and Daryl’s room, because computers take too much electricity, and their electricity comes from people, not from companies.

There are about ten people, Luke tells him, that can raise electricity from their fingertips. There are generators they can transfer the electricity to, and that feeds the city for a couple of weeks at a time. It’s draining for them, though, but they don’t have to do it if they don’t want to. It just comes naturally, Luke says, wanting to feed the city like the city feeds them. 

“Tell me your happiest childhood memory,” Luke asks, abruptly.

Michael turns to him with raised eyebrows, curious with the sudden change, but Luke’s giving him a funny look of excitement with one arm around his shoulders, so he indulges him, after snorting and shaking his head a bit. 

“I think maybe first day of the freshman year of high school,” Michael says, sighing softly. “I had this best friend… The one whose sister ended up arresting me, I told you about that already,” he rolls his eyes, snorting again, this time more bitter than amused. “That was way before that, though. We were waiting outside the school, and we were so nervous… Wait, that’s not really… we were like fourteen or so. That’s not really a childhood memory, is it?”

Luke smiles at him. “It doesn’t matter. Go on.”

“Okay,” Michael relaxes again. “We were nervous. Starting high school _is_ unnerving,” Michael stares at him, like Luke knows what he’s talking about. It takes one look to realize Luke doesn’t, and so he lowers his head to Luke’s chest again, pressing his lips together for a second before continuing. “We were talking about maybe skipping class, even though it was the first day, because we were so terrified, but we wouldn’t say that. I told him he was lame for being nervous, he’d tease me for having sweaty palms.”

“That doesn’t sound very happy,” Luke says, his tone playful.

Michael chuckles. “Wait, the story isn’t over yet. So anyway, we were sitting on the sidewalk outside the school, considering maybe running away and never returning. Everyone there seemed cooler than us, even though… Calum _was_ cool. He was the coolest. I just didn’t have the nerve to tell him, so I guess he didn’t know at the time,” he pauses, the memory suddenly making him uncomfortable. He notices that Luke’s hand stops on his shoulder, the soothing rhythm of gentle circles suddenly gone. Michael clears his throat. “A girl came out of nowhere. She had long red hair, brown eyes that looked like fire, freckles all over her nose and cheeks. She gave us one good look, and said that we were sulking, and only losers sulked.”

Luke laughs quietly, wrapping both of his arms around Michael casually. “Such a charmer.”

“Her name’s Maddy,” Michael tells Luke, smiling softly. “She was… I mean, she is? I think she still is. A force of nature, I mean, that’s what she is. She made us feel like we were part of something great, just by being next to her.”

Luke hums in understanding. “So were the three of you like the three musketeers?”

Michael considers this.

“Um.”

Maybe, for a while, before Calum finally decided to ask her out, probably in love with her since day one. And she said yes, because who wouldn’t, and then they were dating, and Michael was just not needed around anymore. It’s strange, thinking back like this, without the fog of anger and betrayal making his head heavy and his shoulders tense. He thinks, to an extent, he still resents Maddy -- for being fearless, for being beautiful, for having Calum’s heart on the spot. But then again, it was so long ago, and he doesn’t truly know how to deal with those feelings anymore without at least a little bit of forgiveness. Even if he won’t put that name to it. He’ll say it’s just time passing, but it’s more. Maybe it’s a little bit of forgiveness plus a little bit of nostalgia.

“For a while,” is what he says instead.

Luke seems to understand, because he kisses the top of Michael’s head, and they’re quiet for a moment. Michael doesn’t let himself wonder how about Calum, how about Maddy, and how about Calum-and-Maddy. Whether they’re still together, whether they’re still as involved in politics as they were when Michael last saw them. Whether they both still hate Michael.

He won’t go there, so instead he raises his head from Luke’s chest and asks: “What about you? Happiest childhood memory.”

It takes a while for Luke to come up with something. He hums and hums in a way that’s both amusing and adorable, and Michael rolls his eyes and snorts, staring at him, steals a kiss or two because it feels like it’s just his job at this point, and Luke giggles lowly but keeps Michael caged in his arms. It’s the only idea of cage Michael’s comfortable with.

Eventually, he sighs, relaxing his shoulders, and says: “Okay, I got one. I was somewhere between ten and eleven, which makes Jack somewhere between fifteen and sixteen. It was shortly after Mum and Ben died,” he says, but he doesn’t sound mournful, just natural. Michael tries not to wince at that, because his chin is rested on Luke’s chest and he’s looking at his boyfriend in the eye. “We were trying to find a place to stay, but at the same time just… running in circles, I guess. We kept going to the same places. Slept on park benches once, but Jack kept having nightmares that someone took me, so he didn’t feel comfortable sleeping there anymore. Mostly, we just broke into stores to stay the night,” Luke smirks, the part that goes implied that they probably stole as much food and money as they could as well. “Then one day, we’re caught. This lady who owns a shop just a few miles from the city decides to open the place a bit earlier, and finds a teenager and a child on an inflatable bed, covered in towels.”

“Inflatable beds suck,” Michael notes, raising an eyebrow.

Luke shrugs, like he doesn’t mind it. Michael feels like an idiot for having commented on it, and looks away, blinking a couple of times and catching his bottom lip between his teeth. Luke doesn’t seem to mind that he commented, either, though. “She could’ve just called the police, but instead she asked us why we were there. And, you know, Jack lied.”

The familiar mischief glinting in Luke’s eyes makes Michael smile immediately. “Thought you didn’t approve of lies,” he teases, one of his hands going to Luke’s middle, meaning to poke him, but ends up just sliding his thumb over the smooth unscarred skin with a small smile.

Rolling his eyes, Luke drops his head back, staring at the ceiling. “Well, I don’t. But that was life or death. And Jack was just being smart. He said we’d lost our parents to Chaos, which I guess, in a way, in a very fucked up way, was true. He never even mentioned Ben, but I see now it’d just be a complication. Sort of sad that my brother became a complication, but.”

Michael doesn’t see how that’s a happy story. 

Lowering his face gently to Luke’s chest again, his hands go up, tracing lightly the scars on his belly and chest. “I understand,” he says, and it’s a lie, because he doesn’t, but again it’s one Luke needs. 

“The lady bought it, of course. Jack could be very charming when he was younger and desperate,” he says, slowly, and Michael laughs quietly at the implication that now Jack isn’t charming anymore. “She took us to her house. Said her daughter had been killed in the crossfire between Chaos and Order, and that she was sick of war and the all the killing. Said she’d have me and Jack as her children, if we didn’t mind. Did we mind free food and shelter? We didn’t. We just wanted to be able to eat properly, to feel safe. And being with her, and her husband, too, it gave us that. It allowed us to just stop running for a while.”

Quietly, Michael asks: “Did you have a room?”

Luke chuckles lowly. “I had the best room. It was a girl’s room, so it had lots of dolls and stuffed animals, but I liked to play with everything, since I’d lost all my toys. I shared the room with Jack, but it didn’t matter much, because we each had a bed, and in the first week, the lady bought me more toys, and bought Jack books. He was always interested in how things were made, and her husband was an engineer, so Jack would disappear in the man’s garage for hours, putting things together and apart again.”

“Sounds fun,” Michael smiles.

“It was. I think it was the happiest I’ve ever been as a child. Even when Mum, Dad and Ben were alive, it was still… complicated. Difficult. Too much running, too much fear, not enough kisses on forehead and hugs, you know what I mean?” And this, this Michael understands. He props himself up on his elbow by Luke’s side, looking at him. “It felt like having a normal family.”

“For a while,” Michael adds, waiting for the inevitable.

Luke meets his eyes with a sad little smirk. “For a while,” he agrees.

“What happened? If you want to talk about it, I mean.”

“It’s okay,” Luke shrugs, finally one hand letting go of Michael, the other sliding down from his shoulders to his back. “We were… Jack could hide it well. He could always make it seem like he just hadn’t figured out his magick yet, that he was a tragic case of being slow. But I didn’t even know what mine would be, and I knew, we both knew, that when it started boiling up inside of me, it’d come out in explosions. And it did. One day, it just did,” he sighs, averting his gaze. “It was dinner. I broke my own cutlery in half, and the more nervous I got, the more all the metal in the house vibrated with my nervousness, until my eyes were properly rolled back, and the man I’d been trying to call Dad for about two months, took a gun from the closet, and pointed at me.”

Michael frowns, holding his breath.

“That’s…”

“Jack didn’t let anything happen, of course. But I think it was the worst for him, you know? He was just as panicked as I was, if not more. He stuck a fork to the man’s arm, and I do think he liked the man more than he ever liked Dad. That’s why I think it was worse for him than for me,” Luke says, quietly. Michael looks down, unable to form any coherent thoughts. Luke continues: “It bought us some time, though. They were both pretty shocked that we were Chaos, and that Jack had hurt the man, so Jack took my hand and we left. We were running again. Not full six months later, Daryl found us, and brought us to Death Valley.”

Finally releasing his breath, Michael looks at him.

Michael doesn’t know how come that Luke can say all of that without even tearing up. He certainly couldn’t. And then, because he can’t help it, because he loves him so much and because it’s time they both start healing just a little bit anyway, Michael gets closer to him, and presses his lips to Luke’s forehead. When he backs off, Luke’s frowning at him in confusion. Michael smiles softly, and wraps both of his arms around Luke’s middle, even if Luke has to move for him to accomplish that, and when it finally starts clicking for Luke, Michael hugs him, hiding his face in the crook of Luke’s neck.

Luke kisses the top of his head again, mid-hug.

“Hey,” Luke says, very quietly, just above a murmur. Michael hums to show that he’s listening, but doesn’t move away from him. “I love you.”

Michael giggles, and though he finds it strange in him, like the sounds don’t belong to his body, he bites at the skin of Luke’s neck weakly just to prove a point, whatever that may be, and kisses the spot between words, saying: “I love you so much.” 

Five kisses. One for each word.


	23. and if you don't know now you know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm so /happy/ about this chapter. i'm so happy with opia in general. i'm so happy that so many of you seem to still be on board even after such a long time. thank you so much for having my back. you guys are truly fucking rock stars, and i'm so grateful. :') hope you enjoy the chapter!!!

It’s no real surprise that Michael and Luke end up barely leaving the room at all, the plans of having dinner with Joel and his family sent to hell the second Michael traps Luke underneath him and starts kissing his neck. It’s like room 93, Michael thinks, only a thousand times better and safer, no looking over his shoulder, no nothing. There are still threats, Michael knows, with the two Champions that aren’t in Death Valley yet, and the thickness in the air that tells him there’s something he’s missing. But overall, the bubble around them has been reestablished, the bedroom with the broken glass more than enough to make their sense of reality shattered, but their sense of belonging intact.

They sneak out to have dinner once Luke’s sure everyone has already eaten, and though Michael’s sure that Daryl will come knocking on his door, it doesn’t happen. Luke gets a weird look on his face, says it’s probably because of Nate and Annika. Michael doesn’t ask any questions, or not about that anyway. He does shift his weight to the other foot, raising his eyebrows, and asks: “Soup again?” with a small smile.

Luke rolls his eyes and shoves him away playfully. “Shuddup.”

But it’s just mindless teasing. Michael knows, or images at least, that food isn’t very luxurious in Death Valley. Apart from pastries, that Luke’s told him they can usually get and have done, grains became rare since the human attack, since they were the ones growing them in their village up. There are still a few things, Luke had told Michael, but Daryl’s probably saving the better food for the dinner when he’ll announce the new Head Champion. For that, Nate and Annika need to be back, Luke had stressed.

Michael doesn’t know what the rush is. He’d gladly have months of this.

It’s the strangest thing, waking up the next day, not feeling Luke’s arms around him or his chest as a pillow, and yet not panicking, not at first anyway. Michael thinks it’s maybe what Death Valley does to people, over time. It gives them a fake sense of security that will inevitably be shred. But for now, it just means Michael rolls to the side, reaching blindingly for Luke’s body on the other side. He finds nothing, so he groans and calls his boyfriend’s name, as loud as his sleepy state allows him.

“Shower!” Luke yells from the en suite bathroom door ajar, and Michael nods to himself even though nobody’s watching him, and takes a deep breath, blinking sleepiness away as he stares at the ceiling.

His eyes naturally drift to the window and its broken glass. He stares at the sharp edges for a second, thinking maybe he sees something leaving, something grainy and detached and strange. But when he blinks and looks again, there’s nothing. Probably still half-sleeping.

Yawning, Michael rubs his eyes, sits on the bed, and in what seems to him as a painfully slow fashion, he puts on proper clothes. His stomach complains, he’s hungry; his hair covering his eyes when he bends over, trying to build a shell for his body with his back and arms. He yawns a second time, this time loudly, and combs his long hair back. He really does need a haircut.

In his sleepy state, the only thing he craves more than going back to bed is eating. Actually, no, he’s wrong, eating is the only thing on his mind. He doesn’t even bother letting Luke know, he just stands up and leaves the room, on only an oversized striped T-shirt, courtesy of Daryl, and sweatpants. His warm feet against the cold floor makes a shiver go up his spine, but it’s still not enough to tell him it may not be his best idea yet to go straight for the kitchen.

By the time he reaches downstairs, he’s more or less conscious that he should’ve let Luke know where he was going, or that he should’ve stopped by Halsey’s room, checked on her, seen how she’s doing. He hasn’t seen her since that incident in Daryl’s office, when he blacked out, out of nowhere, and suddenly Caleb and Halsey were both there as well, as if this was a security breach or something of the sort.

Michael rubs the back of his head, staring ahead at the corridor with the closed doors of rooms of Champions, passes them slowly, wondering which door would lead him to Luke’s unoccupied room, and when he reaches the end of the corridor, walks in the kitchen.

He isn’t alone.

There are three other people in there, all sitting around a table. One is Caleb, and he’s laughing, shaking his head, and the look is a bit out of fashion on him, like he shouldn’t be allowed to have fun, if the first time Michael saw him he was cutting Jack’s air supply. Sitting across from him is a shirtless man with freckles over his nose and shoulders, brown skin, and wild black curly hair. To his side is a girl, maybe taller than Michael, with strong arms that show in a sleeveless yellow shirt, and a pair of gray sweatpants no different than Michael’s. She’s the first to notice Michael, looking over her shoulder with a reticent tone, the smile on her lips becoming a shadow.

Michael shifts his weight to the other foot in the kitchen entrance, and considers whether it’s too late to just turn away and leave, pretending he never interrupted this moment. 

The girl gives him a funny look.

“Who’s you?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

Both Caleb and the other man turn to look at Michael, then. It’s definitely too late to leave, at least without making it about ten times as awkward as it already is. He opens and closes his mouth, the indecision weighing his shoulders back as he looks from one to the next.

He’d assumed it was Nathan and Annika, finally back, but they exchange a look and Michael finds it hard to believe they’re Champions, especially the shirtless man. The man gives him a long look, from head to toe, and raises an eyebrow at him. Michael stares back, cocking an eyebrow himself, feeling suddenly defensive and ready to argue.

But the man who is probably not Nate doesn’t mirror his defensiveness. He smirks up at him, a dimple appearing in his cheek as he tilts his head to the side. “I don’t know, but I like it.”

Michael snorts, taking a step back as if the comment and the hungry eyes on him throw him off in terms of balance, too. He blinks a couple of times, staring at the man, and Caleb sighs heavily, speaking between gritted teeth:

“Off limits, Jason. _Off. Limits._ ”

The second time he says it, he punctuates his pause with narrowed eyes and flared nostrils. It makes the woman let out a little, “Huh,” and then look back at Caleb, equal parts amused and curious. It takes Jason a moment to look away from Michael and to Caleb again, and when he does, he still looks like he’s having a good time, entertained especially by Caleb’s snappiness that wasn’t there a second ago.

“He’s your prince, not mine,” he shrugs.

The thing about Michael is that prior to Luke, he doesn’t think anyone ever took a real interest in him. He’s used to seeing that look in Jason’s face when Jason looks back at him, but it was in both girls and boys looking at Calum, before everything. It was in everyone’s faces and Michael’s learned to identify that type of interest, of thirst, but it was just never directed at him before. Before Luke, anyway, and now to see that someone else seems interested makes him feel a little shocked, if anything. There isn’t any time to feel flattered; shock and outrage wash over him, his cheeks burning as he frowns, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I,” he starts, clears his throat. “I have a boyfriend.”

It clicks for Jason, and Michael thinks that if Caleb wasn’t there, maybe this is when he’d stop, but Caleb’s still watching him closely like he may snap at him again, so Jason’s eyes go to Caleb and then back at Michael. He’s still smirking, but the hunger’s off his eyes.

“I’m not the jealous type, Prince,” he says, the last word heavy with irony.

Caleb shuts his eyes and massages his temples. It looks like his head may explode. The woman snorts, looking back at Jason, and Jason winks at her, but Caleb doesn’t see it. Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, not really sure how to react, but Caleb does it for him, saying, exasperated: “Fucking stop already before Daryl hears something.”

“You do realize Daryl’s not even in the house, right?” the woman asks, casually, looking back at the empty plate in front of her.

“Still, Diana,” Jason says, “what if he hears about this, and blames Caleb for not being the perfect bodyguard? What if the prince isn’t as virginal as Daryl may have idealized! The horror!” he raises his eyebrows and widens his eyes, tone full of fake-concern. Diana laughs, and Caleb shoots them a pointed look. “Awn, Caleb, we just messin’ with you,” he smiles.

Caleb’s still glaring at Jason.

Michael’s frown goes away, and he takes a deep breath.

“I just… wanted to get something to eat.”

It turns out a little confused, he supposes, but it’s just that he feels as if he may be still dreaming. Caleb, who was violent and brutal to Jack the first time Michael saw him, looks down and shakes his head, blushing, like he’s embarrassed of his friends. Because Jason and Diana are his friends, Michael realizes, and the realization startles him. People that aggressive aren’t supposed to have friends. Especially not if they’re aggressive towards Michael’s people. If it’s their own aggression, Michael can handle it. It’s different, he thinks, watching Diana snort fondly and Jason smirk up at Caleb, to look at them like this, like the world is upside down.

“There’s bagels,” Diana points between them on the table. It’s true. There are only three, but they’re there. Michael’s frown is back, and he shifts his weight to the other foot, unsure on whether it’s appropriate to take one and leave, or if he should stay with these people. Diana gives him one long look, and purses her lips. “What? The prince doesn’t want to eat with the humans?” she cocks an eyebrow.

“Di,” Caleb sighs, exasperation back as well.

Michael stutters, trying to defend himself, explain that’s not it at all, that he’s half-Chaos and half-Order, and if anyone was to have any prejudice on magick or lack thereof, it would certainly not be him. He’s dating a boy with fabricated magick running in his veins. That’s not Michael’s problem at all. 

But strangely enough, Jason comes to his aid. 

“I have an idea,” he says, slowly, “why don’t the two of you get to work, while I have another bagel with the prince here?” He smiles. If he had magick in him, Michael thinks it would be the same unspoken magick about Joel: the charm, the way he makes his words sound like orders without making it blatant. Only, Joel doesn’t know how charming he is, and Jason seems to know exactly how much.

Caleb stands up first, bending closer to Jason with his palm on the table. “Behave.”

Jason only smirks up to Caleb, batting his eyelashes in a purposefully obnoxious way, but Michael doesn’t feel awkward about it anymore, only has to bite back a smile, looking away. Diana sighs, puts her hand on Caleb’s shoulders. She’s his height, tall and lean, looks even stronger than him in comparison, her arms toned, the muscles flexing under her skin as she leads Caleb out. 

They both stare at Caleb and Diana leaving, until they’re by themselves in the kitchen.

Avoiding Jason’s eyes, Michael clears his throat, takes Caleb’s seat across from him, and takes a bagel. He takes a bite, too, feeling Jason’s eyes studying him, not seizing him up like before, but trying to read him. It’s not the most comfortable thing, but Michael doesn’t feel threatened.

“So I’m Jason, that was Diana, and the other guy is Caleb,” he says, finally.

Michael raises his eyes to meet Jason’s. “I knew Caleb.” Jason blinks a couple of times, looking at him, like he’s trying to make up his mind about something. It takes him too long, though, the bitterness in Michael’s voice growing thick, and he can’t help himself; ends up asking: “Is he aware that you’re a human? Because last I checked, he wasn’t a fan.”

Snorting, Jason stares at him, tilting his head to the side. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Caleb is a sociopath,” Michael states, matter-of-factly, speaking with his mouth full.

“Granted,” Jason nods, apparently delighted by Michael’s hesitation and repressed anger. “But point me to one fully sane person in this hellhole, and I may have to kiss you full on the mouth,” he smiles, but it doesn’t sound flirty, just smug. “There isn’t a single person fighting this war, killing so many, who isn’t. Me included. You included. Everyone included.”

“It’s different,” Michael tries, putting the bagel back on the plate in front of him. His shoulders tense, he frowns, too, trying to think of arguments. “Caleb doesn’t like Halsey, because she’s Order-born. Plus he’s a bully, I saw him attack Jack.”

Jason gives him a funny look, raising his eyebrows, and then takes a deep breath.

He’d sort of expected Jason to agree with him, nod slowly and say he hadn’t thought of it that way. He is human, after all, is supposed to know better than anyone else. But he doesn’t. He keeps looking at Michael like he’s thinking of ways to break it to him, and then eventually, after a pause that feels too long and strange, he gives Michael a bit of a pointed look, and says:

“He hates Halsey because she always had it too easy. He hates Jack because Jack is the biggest threat to Death Valley since Scarlet left.”

It comes in one breath, Jason’s brown eyes heavy on him, making Michael feel like the discomfort of this conversation is suddenly too much, and he has to leave. He blinks a couple of times, not daring to break eye-contact, but still knowing he’ll be the first to look away. He presses his lips together, takes a deep breath, and then, surely, he looks down to his bagel again. Taking it in his hands and staring at the piece of bread like it may give him some confidence, he shrugs.

“Everyone likes to tell their side of the story here. It can be overwhelming.”

He doesn’t know why he’s honest. He’s only just met this guy.

Jason chuckles lowly, the dimples on each side of his cheeks appearing. “Wouldn’t you like to tell your side of the story, too? Wouldn’t you defend your friends if you saw them being hated for somebody else’s twisted side of the story?” he cocks an eyebrow. Michael looks at him. He considers Caleb a friend. That’s not supposed to be as mind-blowing as it is to him, but it is. “Don’t get me wrong, alright? I think Halsey’s alright. I’ve fought alongside with her before. She’s quick and good and resourceful. But when everyone was getting their training, being stuck with Nicole in a warehouse making their bodies stronger, faster, harder, Halsey was in Daryl’s office getting tips on how to make her magick more powerful. It’s a privilege, and it’s favouritism. It didn’t sit well with any of the other Champions, and if you’ve ever seen someone else have it too easy, you should know it sucks.”

Michael only looks at him, and says nothing.

“I know Halsey’s expecting Caleb to attack her. He’s always been the most vocal about how unfair Daryl’s treatment of her was. Geordie told me about it, asked if I knew what was going to happen next. But Caleb isn’t going to do anything if he’s not provoked. It’s with Nate she has to worry, not Caleb. She should count his blessings they didn’t arrive yesterday, not start poking holes in their story and try to find out what’s wrong with him and Annika, if you ask my opinion,” he rolls his eyes.

“That still… still doesn’t explain why he hates Luke,” he insists.

“He doesn’t,” Jason replies easily, and then: “he does hate Jack. Again, I don’t, it’s not my fight to fight. All Chaos battles I pick, I pick because there’s money for me in it, safety and shelter for my Grandpa as well. But personally? I don’t care that much about Chaos. There are a few witches I consider friends, like Caleb and Ashton, a few witches I feel indebted to for all the help and training I got, like Nicole and Benji, but when it boils down to it, I’m human, I’m not a witch. If all of Chaos burns down, I’m so sorry, but I’m out of here faster than you could start smelling death. But Caleb, he…” he trails off, frowning, looking away from Michael. His face twists in an ugly way, either in concern or disappointment. When he looks back at Michael, Michael feels a little weird. “Caleb loves Death Valley more than anything.” 

Michael takes another bite of the bagel. With his mouth full, he tells him: “Doesn’t tell me shit about why he doesn’t like Jack.”

Jason blinks a couple of times, surprised. “You don’t know about how he got his bracelet,” he says, instead of asking. Michael frowns, stopping, and Jason chuckles lowly again, shaking his head. “You really don’t know.”

“I guess I don’t,” he half-lies, half-states.

“He fucked up in a mission, not sure exactly what it was about. Ashton only told me the basics of it. All I know is one day Ashton and Dylan came back to Death Valley in panic, needing to talk to Daryl alone, saying everything had gone to hell. Daryl had to go rescue Jack and his brother himself. I was in the park having a drink with Geordie, Diana, and Bryn when they came back.” He pauses, his eyes making him look older when he adds: “You won’t meet Bryn. She died in the village attack. But she was a badass warrior,” he pauses, Michael nodding cautiously, and then he continues: “Anyway, so when they came back, Daryl had Luke, this small scrawny kid, practically passed out in his arms, and Jack was by his side, yelling the whole time. Yelling that he’d tell Order about Death Valley, that if Daryl didn’t give his brother back to him, he’d make sure every single Order witch in the globe knew exactly where he was hiding with his people.”

There’s another pause.

“ _His_ people, am I right? Like Jack wasn’t Chaos himself,” he snorts, the disdain showing in his voice. Michael offers no comment, mostly stuck by the part where Luke’s small and almost unconscious in his father’s arms. “As you have probably already observed, we don’t have prisons in Death Valley. Chaos kills their enemies, their threats. But Daryl didn’t kill Jack, I’ll give you that. He put a bracelet around his wrist, locked him up in a lab, and that was all. But he didn’t have to tell anyone about Jack’s empty threats. Everybody heard it. I did, the girls did, and Caleb did. You have to understand that when someone threatens the thing you love the most, it’s personal.”

Michael can relate. 

He looks down at his bagel, taking another bite.

“You mentioned someone named Scarlet.”

“Don’t know much about her, only that the crazy chick tried to burn this house down once,” he shrugs. “Caleb remembers her, because they grew up more or less together before she left Death Valley. But I don’t know. I was still living in the big city while all of that happened.”

Keeping his eyes down, he asks: “Where is she now?”

Jason shrugs. “Dead, probably? I don’t know, prince.”

Feeling a flustered smile come back to his lips, Michael gives him a look. “I’d rather you didn’t call me that. You know my name.”

“Well,” Jason breathes in and then out, smiling so hard his eyes become a bit smaller. “I’d rather you talked to your Dad about giving us assassins-for-hire a raise, but you don’t see me going around bothering you about it, do you?”

Michael rolls his eyes, but he’s still smiling a bit.

“So your Grandpa is alright? You said you have one.”

Jason doesn’t offer him much explanation, just nods, and asks: “Do you?”

It’d been a while since he was last asked normal questions. He thinks back of having breakfast with Benji and Joel, and how strange it is that Benji asking him who is he really was one of the first normal questions he’d been asked since he was broken out of prison. That is, that didn’t involve Luke. Luke didn’t treat him at all like he was the source of something. Luke treated him for who he was, and that was all.

Michael feels the insistent smile creeping back to his lips, that doesn’t match his tone of voice when he meets Jason’s eyes again, saying: “Not really. Mum’s are dead, and I have no idea about Daryl’s parents, but I’m going to go with dead too,” he shrugs. Jason nods, apparently thinking Michael is amusing. “Small family, I guess,” he says, and immediately feels like adding that he means he and Karen, not Daryl in the mix as well, but he doesn’t have any time to do that.

“No brothers or sisters?” he asks.

“Nope. Only child.”

“Me too. That sucks,” Jason says, sighing heavily, looking away. “It makes you think, doesn’t it? That you’ll grow old all alone and there won’t be any link to your history to anchor you. You’ll grow old and senile and as time goes by, you’ll forget who you were to start with.”

Cocking an eyebrow, Michael offers: “That’s a very optimistic take on things.”

Jason laughs, scratching his chest. Michael looks down at his bare chest for a second, then he feels his cheeks burning and looks away immediately, wishing Luke would show up. But Luke doesn’t. Hopefully, Jason, in all his absentmindedness, doesn’t seem to notice it.

“I mean it, though. Wouldn’t you like to have siblings and not be alone?”

Staring at what’s left of his bagel, Michael considers this.

Would he like to drag somebody else into the mess of being half-something and half-something else? No, not really. He’d hate to care for someone like Jack cares for Luke and like Luke cares for Jack, only to have it be ripped away from him like it was with their older brother Ben. He can’t imagine having what Mali-koa and Calum used to have; regardless of how they’re doing now, that protectiveness and unspoken rule of having each other’s back always. Michael thinks he’s maybe too selfish for siblings, in a way that he couldn’t see himself putting somebody else before him at all times, and at the same time, he’s too selfless for siblings, too. He doesn’t wish to anyone else to be placed right in the eye of the hurricane like he is.

But he doesn’t tell Jason all of that. He just shrugs, and Jason nods, like he gets it, all the things that Michael didn’t say.

They’re in silence for a moment, Jason clearly thinking of leaving as he yawns a couple of times and looks over his shoulder, but there are two things Michael still needs to know. Not sure on how to go about them, he just asks them: “Why did you tell Diana and Caleb to get to work? And Diana was the girl who lost her family, right?”

Raising his eyebrows high in surprise, like he’s puzzled as to how the two questions connect, a slow smile starts to spread over Jason’s lips. Michael just watches him with a frown, not sure he’s stepped the line.

“We all work. We don’t have to, for the most part, but we do. There were eighteen survivors from the attack on our village. We’re building houses so they can live in Death Valley now,” he says, sounding more didactic than hurt. Michael takes the last bite from his bagel and tilts his head to the side, looking at Jason, trying to figure out just by looking at him what it’s like to live his life, that of any human’s. “And Di… yeah. Her Mum was our leader. Geordie thinks this means Diana should just become our new representative here. Diana thinks we should wait. Unless she sees Ilana’s body, she’s simply not going to believe her mother’s dead,” he says, his voice growing smaller. Michael wants to tell him to stop, that he doesn’t have to tell him anything else if it hurts, but Jason’s teeth sink into his bottom lip, and when he takes a deep breath and releases his lip, he’s talking again. “You know without Ilana there’s no actual deal between humans and Chaos, right? We don’t know where we stand. Ilana kept in touch with the human leader in the city. We were supposed to have something figured out by now, the war has been going for too long and it’s this close to just going boom,” he half-smiles, but it looks sad. “We don’t know where to turn. We can’t support Chaos if the city humans are supporting Order. And without Ilana, we don’t know what to do.”

Michael looks at him. “But when you say eighteen survived… Only you, Geordie, and Diana can fight, right?”

“Yeah, but Ilana was the leader of all humans in the south; every single village, with varying number of human warriors. She was calling the shots for all of us, while in the north, Uriah was in the city. Now we have no way of contacting him, because Ilana is dead, and no way of contacting any other human from around here. We’re pretty lost, is the thing,” he snorts. 

There’s another moment of pause between them, and then Michael asks him, quiet and serious: “Why did you tell me all that, Jason?”

“You are the prince, aren’t you?” he cocks an eyebrow, smirking up to him. “You’re supposed to save us all.”

* * *

Luke’s not in their room when Michael comes back, and Michael does think it’s the absolutely weirdest thing that he doesn’t feel terrified at that. He thinks it may mean times are changing, finally changing for the best. He brushes his teeth, stays forever in the shower, and when he leaves their room again, he’s taken by the sudden realization that he can do whatever the hell he wants.

He takes a look at Halsey’s closed door, and shifts his weight to the other side. She’s just down the hall. He can just knock and try and talk to her. Maybe it’ll make everything better, too, and he won’t feel like he’s betraying her by keeping to himself what he knows, the part that Jack told him and Daryl confirmed: that she was never supposed to kill Luke at all.

Michael catches his bottom lip between his teeth.

And he looks away.

Looking away means looking at the end of the corridor, past Daryl’s office and, ultimately, to his office. One of the double doors is ajar. Michael takes a deep breath, staring at the door for a second. It makes him feel sick in his stomach, the pull towards the door, towards his father. But if he isn’t brave enough to go to Halsey with the truth, then he sure as hell shouldn’t be seeking more of his father, with _his_ truth, that might as well be lies for all he knows.

Michael sighs, scratches the back of his neck, and with his eyes focused on the old wooden floor, he starts towards the stairs. He sort of wishes, though, that Halsey or Daryl would stop him, call his name, open the doors to their worlds and call to him, so he wouldn’t have to keep finding new ways to escape the right thing, or keep finding new ways to stop himself from being pulled like a magnet to Daryl and his antics. 

He just wants to know more. He wants to know everything.

Nobody calls his name, though, and by the time he comes downstairs, he sees the front door open wide, and that’s enough invitation that he leaves. 

Walking down these streets feel odd. He doesn’t know the way to many places: Jack’s lab, which is a no, and the main park with the swings that’s more towards the entry of the place. Michael’s feet take him there without a second thought. He’s not fidgety, even, just a bit annoyed at how his bangs keep falling over his eyes and he has to comb them back with his fingers. Even though his hair is wet from the shower, it still doesn’t seem to keep in place.

He’s supposed to feel like a foreigner here.

Michael’s acutely aware of all the things he grew up listening, believing, reproducing: that Chaos is dirty and wrong, that they’re all murderers. And he is, too, now. He’s a murderer and if it’s true that so is most of Chaos, then so is most of Order, too, by omission and by their own bloody hands as well. Karen knew he was going to be caught. Karen knew about the prophecy. She still didn’t stop it. 

Though he tries not to blame her, knows while he can’t listen to her side of the story he shouldn’t take sides, it’s hard to feel like she’s on his. Karen, just like most of Order, most of Chaos, like Daryl and like himself, is a murderer, because she let Michael be killed by Order the second they arrested him, and for all the six months that they kept on killing him and not letting him know.

The handful chunks of memory that remain alive in his head aren’t enough to spoil his good mood. He registers what comes to him, and lets it slip away again. He just keeps on walking, ignoring the curious looks from the few people who watch him as he makes his way to the park. He wonders if they all know who he is, the promise of the prophecy, and what Daryl has told them all about it. If he’s the type of leader to push all the responsibility of glory to the next one to come. Mostly, he just wonders how long until those shoes are his to take.

He’s equal parts surprised and amused when he gets to the park and finds that he was definitely not the first one to think of going there.

Luke’s sitting in one of the swings with Tati on his lap, and she’s laughing at something someone else has said. Luke’s hair is damp and all combed back, and Michael likes that look. He wants to march in purposefully and kiss him. But that would mean having to move Tati, and he isn’t that mean. 

On the other swing by their side is a boy who looks to be eleven or twelve. He’s got thick black hair, eyes so green that it calls Michael’s attention immediately, and angular features, sharp squared jaw. He’s the first one to notice Michel approaching, and when he does, Michael finds that he can’t move much at all. The boy looks at him, blinks slowly, his face growing expressionless, and Michael doesn’t know what to do about it. 

The boy holds his gaze for a couple of seconds, but then someone yells, “You made it!” and Michael looks away from the boy, following the voice.

It’s Ashton, sitting on one of the benches, his arm around another boy who looks to be around twelve. Based on the smile plastered on Ashton’s face, Michael knows the boy by his side is Harry before even taking a look. But then, looking at the boy, Michael’s sure it can’t be anyone else. The boy has the same color of dirty blond hair as Ashton, his eyes just a tiny bit closer to blue than hazel, and though his nose is slightly crooked and different than Ashton’s, the overall of his face still screams they’re closely related.

Harry gives him a shy little smile, and then looks down at his lap.

Michael stops a few feet away from Ashton and Harry, closer to him, and gives an uncertain smile to him, then Tati, then Luke, skipping the other boy on purpose, still feeling a little uncomfortable about that.

“Hey, babe,” Luke smiles.

Babe. 

Jesus Christ.

Michael looks down, flustered, raising his eyebrows and parting his lips to try to come up with something in time that this is not completely awkward. Tati giggles, loudly, apparently not letting this one slide, and the boy on the other swing gives them a very forced chuckle as if he’s just amusing everyone involved. Michael blinks a couple of times, and takes a deep breath.

But Ashton still talks first. “This is my little brother,” he says, proudly displaying the boy under his shoulder like it’s his own son. Harry rolls his eyes, accordingly, like his child would, but he’s biting back a smile. “And that is Michael, Haz.”

Harry stares at Ashton for a second, as if he’s this close to explaining in detail how he does indeed have a voice of his own. Michael thinks maybe spending the last six years away has prevented Ashton from knowing how the minds of pre-teens work, but Michael still remembers his very well.

Michael walks to them and offers his hand to be shaken.

Harry takes it, cocking an eyebrow, with a little smile.

“Nice to meet you, dude. Heard you went on a mission of your own, right?”

“Yeah, and I’m not thirteen yet, so,” he shrugs, smugly. Ashton gives him a disapproving look, but it escapes him, holding eye-contact with Michael. He has a firm enough handshake for a twelve year old.

“Alright,” Michael lets go of his hand, smiling quietly at him. “And how did it go?”

Harry exchanges a look with someone behind Michael. At first Michael thinks it’ll be Tati or Luke, then he remembers the boy. He looks over his shoulder, and surely enough, they’re looking at each other, information passing seamlessly without them having to talk. Then Harry looks back at Michael, and says: “We found enough food for a while, we think. But Dennis did most of the work.”

Michael raises his eyebrows, vaguely interested, turning back to Luke.

He isn’t interested in food scavenging missions. He isn’t even that interested in Ashton’s brother, though he is, of course, happy that Harry made it back to Death Valley safely. He just wants to maybe kiss Luke a lot so he kicks aside everything Jason told him. It’s not that late to drag Luke back into their bedroom for some more alone time.

He’s smirking up at Luke, and he thinks Luke can maybe read minds, too, in addition to the eventual control of them, because he’s smirking back at him like he understands. 

Then Tati breaks the spell, saying: “This is Dennis! He’s my big brother.” 

Michael looks from her, still on Luke’s lap, to the boy on the next swing. Dennis gives him a short nod that’s probably supposed to serve as a greeting, but it comes out as weirdly mocking instead. Michael chuckles lowly, says, “Hey there, Dennis,” and Dennis just gives him a pressed smile in return.

“We were exchanging war stories,” Luke tells him, pulling Tati closer to him. She leans into him easily, resting her head on his chest. She blinks vertically at Michael, and Michael blinks horizontally back at her, smiling quietly. She seems to get it, too, the toothy smile on her face too much to ignore. “They ran into a pack of wolves. Dennis killed them all.”

There’s pride in Luke’s voice, so Michael’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to be horrified that a twelve or thirteen year old killed a pack of wolves. When he looks at Dennis again, he’s not paying Michael any attention anymore. His eyes are on his sister, looking at her fondly, but just until she looks back at him, and then, he looks at his feet.

“That’s… nice,” Michael tries.

“Very nice,” Ashton says, sounding just as proud as Luke had. “That means Death Valley will have meat this week,” he winks. Michael’s never eaten wolf meat, so he just nods slowly, trying to take the shock out of his face. “Of course, Daryl is saving the best of the food for the announcement dinner, but for that Annika and Nate have to be back…”

Ashton’s not very subtle trailing off ends up with him giving Luke a pointed look, that Luke promptly ignores, staring at the back of Tati’s head, his hands getting a giggle out of her by poking at her belly unexpectedly. Dennis smiles at that. He has a weird smile, Michael thinks, though Michael can’t put his finger around it.

Michael walks to the unoccupied bench on the other side, across from Ashton and Harry; Luke, Tati and Dennis between them on the swings. “Hey, Luke, you said something about taking me to Joel’s later, for a haircut or something?” he frowns, confusedly, his hand going immediately to his way too long hair, consciously. 

“That’s because of me,” Harry volunteers, before Luke can reply.

“Yeah?” Michael cocks an eyebrow.

“Yeah, I… Now that Ash’s back, things are going to change, right? We’ll live together again,” he states, but it sounds more like a question. Ashton doesn’t answer that question, just gives him a pressed smile, that shouldn’t be enough, but Harry doesn’t ask more, just turns back to Michael. “I’ve been living at Joel and Nic’s for the past few years, which is alright, even though I have to share a room with someone annoying—”

Dennis snorts loudly, forcing his body forward on the swing as if out of habit. “Excuse me? I’m lovely company,” he says, smiling wickedly. Michael finds himself mirroring that smile. Harry rolls his eyes at Dennis, and Dennis smirks up at him. Michael assumes there are pranks involved.

“Anyway—” Harry stats over, and this time it’s Michael who interrupts him.

“Wait, so does that mean,” he stops himself suddenly, pausing and looking at Tati, then at Dennis. “You two,” he gestures at the space between them, between the swings, “are Joel’s kids?”

His frown grows deeper.

Dennis nods with a cocked eyebrow, almost challengingly, but Tati looks happy to nod and clap her hands together just once, letting out an excited, “Yes!” Michael tries to hide his surprise, but he’s not very good at it, judging by the brief scowl he gets from Dennis. It’s just that Dennis looks so old to be their children, and Tati looks… so different than Joel.

But he hasn’t met Nicole yet, he supposes.

He clears his throat awkwardly with a pressed smile, and looks back at Harry. “Sorry. You were saying?”

“Harry’s magick is awesome,” Ashton says, taking Harry’s turn to talk, too.

Harry takes a deep breath, and shakes his head with a fond smile. It’s only then that Michael’s eyes drift back to Harry’s little wrists, and he sees a bracelet going around it, three gems exactly the same as the ones there were in the bracelet that Luke had put around his wrist the first day they met. They’re inhibiting Harry’s magick. Michael holds his breath, feeling suddenly uncomfortable, looking at Luke for some type of help, but Luke doesn’t seem him. Luke’s eyes are back to Harry, still looking somewhat proud of the kid fidgeting with the metal bracelet around his wrist.

“It’s not awesome, and it’s not even close to being under control,” Harry sighs heavily, and then: “But people seem to accept being my guinea pigs for haircuts.”

Michael takes a deep breath, and frowns.

“I don’t understand,” is the first thing he says. He can’t keep his eyes off the bracelet, so he adds, lowly: “Do you need help, Harry?”

“Help?” Harry asks, frowning, his tone matching the confusion in Michael’s first sentence, and then, blinking a couple of times, he follows Michael’s eyes to his bracelet and confusion vanishes from his face. He chuckles, and then just smiles fondly, his fingers letting go of the bracelet. “I got help. That’s why I have this.”

He stares at Harry.

Ashton gets quiet beside him, and Michael gets the impression that maybe Ashton isn’t so comfortable with the bracelet, either. Harry takes a deep breath, looking up at the fireflies that make their version of the sky, and then closes his eyes. He seems to hold his breath for a couple of seconds, and then his fingers go back to the bracelet, and click something into it that makes the bracelet open. 

The bracelet falls to his lap, like a broken toy.

When Harry opens his eyes again, they’re all white, but the magick that comes is anything but what Michael would have expected. Unlike any graceful body change that Michael has seen before from Order-born witches, Harry’s hands change. His knuckles seem to bend until they break, and his shoulders jerk upwards as if he feels the pain just the same, even if this is part of who he is. Michael’s frowning and parting his lips, the whisper for him to stop hurting himself about to fall from his lips, when it all stops.

In both of Harry’s hands, his fingers are shaped longer and thinner, and when Michael looks closely, he sees that the boy has blades for fingers.

Michael swallows the lump in his throat, chuckling as he finds Harry’s eyes again. “That’s incredible,” he says, a little out of breath.

Harry smirks. “So, how about that haircut you were talking about?”


	24. the key is in the past

It’s strange.

Harry’s good with his bladed fingers, and Michael relaxes even though the boy could slice his throat open. But that’s the realization that makes the experience surreal -- that this twelve year old boy holds in his hands powerful weapons, ten in total. That he could, just as easily as he cuts Michael’s hair the way he’d asked, take someone’s life, or multiple someones, and it’d be just as easy, just as effortless.

He seems to be the only one thinking about that.

Michael’s sitting sitting on the bench, Harry standing behind him, hands going over his hair as he participates in excited conversation with Luke and Ashton about Dennis killing those wolves. That’s another thing that Michael can’t quite process. Dennis is unfazed by the conversation, just keeps his attentions to Tati on the swing next to him, entertained by Luke and still on his lap. Dennis doesn’t seem like he’s listening to them at all.

Because he can feel chunks of his hair falling to his shoulders, and it’s unnerving that he can’t look, even more so that it’s a twelve year old giving him the haircut, he clears his throat, and asks: “So, Dennis, how did you kill those wolves anyway?”

Dennis gives him a brief look.

Though they’ve just met, Michael doesn’t think Dennis likes him very much.

“Gun,” he answers, simply.

Michael had been hoping Dennis would tell him what his magick is, but no such luck, apparently. He nods slowly, a little frustrated but trying not to let it show, and Tati gives Dennis a wary look, like she can tell something Michael can’t. Luke clears his throat, too, and it sounds more awkward than it had when Michael did it a second ago. He rests his chin on the top of Tati’s head, and she glares up, but can’t see him.

“I think we should celebrate it, don’t you think?”

“The killing?” Michael frowns.

“Having meat,” Ashton explains, half-smiling.

“Oh.”

Michael feels one of Harry’s fingers close to his scalp on the left side of his head. He takes a deep breath, his shoulders tensing again, and Harry chuckles lowly, bitterly, like he can tell Michael’s afraid. It isn’t that he’s afraid Harry will hurt him, though. Michael’s afraid of all the times Harry will inevitably hurt other people, and have to live with that.

“I’ll talk to Mum and Dad, but I think it’ll have to be at Uncle Benji’s,” Dennis says.

Snorting, Harry stops his hands on Michael’s head for a second. “You better talk to Cam, then, not Benji. If she’s still pissed, no way anyone’s celebrating anything.”

Dennis sighs, somewhere between amused and annoyed, and Tati gets off Luke’s lap. “Let’s play hide-and-seek,” she announces. 

Luke stands up too, smiling back at her, but then his eyes pause on Michael. “In a second, we will.”

“What happened between Cameron and Benji anyway? Last I checked they were totally in love, now I hear Joel saying Benji’s sleeping on the couch, and you’re saying Cam is pissed…” Ashton trails off, pulling his legs up on the bench. Dennis sighs again, this time heavily, and Harry lets out a nasal sound before going back to working on Michael’s hair.

“Grown-up stuff, ‘suppose,” he says. And then: “I’m done.”

Harry walks around Michael to assess his work.

Michael blinks a couple of times, as slowly, all pairs of eyes go back to him. He bites the insides of his cheeks, not sure how to deal with all the attention, and touches his head. There aren’t bangs falling to his forehead anymore; he can feel the sides of his head cut so much that it’s as though they’ve been shaved; the middle falling to the right side. An undercut. He smiles.

Finding Luke’s eyes, he asks, smirking: “How do I look?”

The mischief in Luke’s eyes is inebriating. Luke gives Michael one look, and then he doesn’t look away anymore, eyes locking with his, and without any proper warning, Luke walks straight to him, straddles his lap on the bench, one knee beside each of Michael’s thighs, and wraps his arms around Michael’s neck.

Michael laughs, unable to look away from Luke’s eyes, even though his cheeks are burning furiously. Luke smiles up at him, bumps his nose to Michael’s one or two times before pressing his lips to Michael’s.

Finally reacting properly, his hands go to Luke’s waist, as he moves his lips against Luke’s gently. He hears Ashton clear his throat, but he only smiles against Luke’s lips, and Luke kisses him harder. Ashton clears his throat a second time, and says: “Anyway, Harry, Dennis… _kids_ , that are _young_ , because you’re _children_ , we should talk sometime about what’s appropriate and not appropriate for you to do in public places.”

There’s a hint of amusement to his voice, of course, but Michael pulls back, staring at Luke with a shit-eating grin. Luke presses his forehead to Michael’s, and then pecks at his lips just once more. 

“You look so great,” Luke tells him in a whisper.

Michael chuckles, reluctantly letting go of him. “Yeah, you pretty much attacked me, so I could tell you didn’t hate it,” he shrugs. Luke smirks at him, and stands up a bit awkwardly, stopping in front of him. His cheeks are pink. Michael bites the insides of his cheeks, tilting his head to the side. “There’s purple hair in your shirt.”

“There’s purple hair in _your_ shirt,” Luke says, giggling.

He’s giggling. Michael hates this. His face might split with how hard he’s smiling.

“You gonna dye it again?” Harry asks, and Michael remembers that Ashton’s right, they are indeed in a public place, and they’re not alone. Luke turns to look at Harry and so Michael can look at them, too. 

Tati has gravitated towards Dennis, standing closer to her brother now, who’s still sitting in the swing. Now that Luke and Michael aren’t making out anymore, Ashton looks more relaxed, yawning, one arm draped around the backrest of the bench.

“I don’t know,” Michael shrugs. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

There’s a second of peace there, and Michael appreciates that. He thinks, maybe, Death Valley is the place where he could spend months or years and still not feel like he’s still being haunted. He can tell he’s becoming less self-conscious of himself, of danger, of looking over his shoulder. Something clicks for him and it’s a shift turned, he thinks, because he can’t keep it to himself. He stands up too, touches Luke’s arm, until eventually and without a second thought, his hand slides down Luke’s arm until he’s enlacing his fingers with his boyfriend’s. He pulls him closer, a bit to the side, and though they all can still see him, it’s like their bubble is back, protecting them against both all the dangers in the world and the prying eye. Ashton doesn’t clear his throat this time, only asks Harry something Michael doesn’t pay attention to, and that has Tati laughing and Dennis chuckling.

One hand still holding Luke’s, the other stopping at his waist, Michael kisses Luke’s cheek, and resting his face against Luke’s, he tells him, mouth close to his ear but without having the energy to direct it more than that: “I’m happy. Can you believe that?”

He hears the smile in Luke’s voice when he says: “I’m happy too.”

Michael puts some distance between them, so he can look at Luke. Luke’s smiling, definitely, and his cheeks are still pink. Michael snorts, wants to kiss him all over, feels that overwhelming warmness in his chest that makes it hard to look away from Luke. He sort of wants to tell him, how stupid he’d been to resist everything: both getting to know Chaos and falling in love with him. He wants to say that maybe Death Valley will be the closest to home he’ll ever have, and that although he still misses Karen, he feels like he’s got almost everything he needs in this place. That he’s got Luke, and that alone fills all the holes in his recently put-back-together heart. Michael wants to go on a rant about how angry he is at himself and at fate, at The Trinity, at everything, because they could’ve been in each other’s lives for so much longer, keeping loneliness and desperation at bay, and that he loves him so, so much.

But then Tati walks to them, and tugs at Luke’s shirt, annoyed.

“You said we were going to play,” she notes, matter-of-factly.

Luke looks away from Michael, and at Tati. She’s staring at him, expectant, and Michael chuckles lowly, lets go of Luke properly, so Luke can get on his knees and look at her; he spreads his arms. Her toothy grin appears, and she closes her eyes vertically as she launches into his arms.

“Ouch!” Luke complains, but he’s lifting her anyway, both arms wrapped around the little girl. Michael looks at them, and he thinks everyone’s looking, too. Everyone has to. “Alright, you know what to do,” he tells her, and she opens her eyes, a giggle erupting from her throat. 

In a swift motion, she escapes his arms, and crawls around his upper body so she’s positioning herself on his back. Michael has to blink a couple of times, still not quite used to that, to Tati, to her magick, and not so much that, but the body she lives in. Nobody else seems affected by that, though, much less Luke. With Tati’s arms around his neck, he stands up, winks at Michael, and turns to leave.

“Ready?” he asks her. She throws one hand up in the air, whistling loudly. Michael thinks it’s lovely. He can’t whistle that well at all. “Alright!” Luke says, or warns, or something, because then he’s running, properly running, and she’s giggling so much that even when they disappear from their sight, it’s like her voice still echoes in the park.

Standing in the middle of the park, Michael turns to the other three, with a silly smile on his lips. Dennis is still by the swings, looking almost embarrassed to be endeared by his sister, and Harry’s shaking his head, not hiding his fondness, walking to Dennis and taking the swing next to him, the one Luke and Tati were on before.

Michael sits next to Ashton on the bench, and gives him one long look.

He parts his lips to say something, but Ashton’s easy smile catches him off guard, and he says: “Harry did a good job,” and points at Michael’s head. Michael closes his mouth, blinking a couple of times, feeling his cheeks burn. Ashton raises his eyebrows and then frowns slightly. He shakes his head with a little smile, adding: “You have got to learn how to take compliments, Mike.”

“So I’ve been noticing,” Michael says, slowly, and then, lowering his voice: “I met Jason this morning. And Diana. And Caleb, I guess, but I’d already met him that one time when he and Jack…” he trails off.

Ashton just nods, like he’s not sure how to react.

“Jason hit on me,” Michael says, widening his arms, alarmed. Ashton nods carefully, like he’s still waiting for the shocking part. Michael sighs, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, he said other things, too. About Caleb not being as terrible as I thought he was. Are they really friends? Because that’s… that’s not what I expected. For Caleb to have friends, I mean. I thought he hated humans.”

Frowning, Ashton’s look becomes curious. “Why would you think that?”

He snorts, shrugging. “Well, I don’t know, alright? He seemed like a douche.”

Ashton nods, looking away, to his brother and Dennis, both talking quietly as well. Michael wonders for a split second if it’s possible that even though they’re so young, they already have secrets nobody knows about. That if more than friends, they’re also allies -- Michael’s starting to see the difference, though there are people who’ll easily fit both categories. And then he doesn’t wonder about them anymore, because what Ashton’s saying gets his attention, and he turns to him.

“He is. But that’s just me. I’m close to Jack, and I don’t like that Caleb hates him,” he starts, “but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point.” He pauses, and Michael presses his lips together; he fights the urge to interrupt him, waits until Ashton sorts out his thoughts, and then Ashton’s sighing, his shoulders going down as he relaxes again. “You know he has a point, don’t you?”

Michael pauses, looks at him.

Quietly, he nods.

“Yeah,” Ashton adds, like that says it all. In a way, it sort of does.

Their silence grows more comfortable, then, sitting side-by-side and pretending like they aren’t watching Harry and Dennis, when they are. The younger boys seem oblivious though, even if they’re not that far away. They swing slowly, careful not to miss any whispered details. They’re talking about something important, Michael can tell, because Dennis keeps scrunching up his nose in a way that makes Harry roll his eyes dramatically, but they’re both laughing and keeping quiet, which is how Michael knows.

“Jason’s worried about the future of humans in the war,” Michael says, just to look away from the boys. It’s the type of thing that needs that, the eye-contact.

Ashton seems to catch the hint, and looks back at Michael. He raises an eyebrow, says, “I bet he is,” and for a second, Michael thinks that will be all, but then he sighs, looks down to the ground, before looking back at Michael. “Look, something big is coming,” Ashton’s voice becomes quieter, and though they’re sitting side-by-side, it’s still hard to listen when he speaks next. “I don’t know what is it exactly. But I know Daryl’s been asking Jack for things. More technological guns, more cloaks, more than Jack can handle. I think Daryl’s planning an attack. Maybe he goes to the city himself for said _hypothetical_ attack, and if he does, that’s when it happens.”

“It?” Michael echoes, narrowing his eyes.

“War,” Ashton gives him a weird half-smile, one that looks both ugly and bright at the same time. Michael tilts his head to the side, ready to argue, say that the war has been going for a few years behind his back, just under his nose. Ashton shakes his head. “No, Michael, I mean proper war. I mean war like none of us has ever seen. I mean the Magick War will be back, three times worse.” 

Michael nods slowly, presses his lips together, looks away from Ashton, back to Harry and Dennis. His first thought is: what will happen to the children, then? Will they have to stick around to see everyone else die? Will they die first, or last? Because they will die. Michael has read the history books. 

“You think he’s planning something,” Michael adds, his eyes still trained on Dennis, who’s just slapped Harry’s shoulder, making Harry throw his head back, laughing. Dennis proceeds to scowl at him, but that only seems to make the laughing matter worse.

“I know he is,” Ashton says. “But he won’t make a move before Annika and Nate come back. He needs a new Head Champion. But still, the humans need to take a side, you know what I mean? If humans decide to fight alongside Order, Jason, Geordie and Diana can’t singlehandedly decide to help Chaos. But we need their help. We really, really do,” Ashton laughs quietly, exasperated. It sounds strange, too. “Not so much the humans around here, I mean; don’t get me wrong, they’re great fighters, and I sure love Jason and Geordie a lot, even if Diana and I aren’t that close. But the humans in the city? The scientists? They were good enough to develop the drug that gave Luke a second magick. They just don’t know it worked. But they’re _that_ good, Michael. They’re scary-good.”

“Who knew humans would be the scary ones,” Michael snorts. He shakes all the thoughts that come to him by instinct; the ones he was raised on, and the ones that came later, too. “Makes you think, doesn’t it,” he raises his eyebrows, his eyes reluctantly going back to Ashton. “What type of thing they have made that we don’t even know about. If they were good enough to do something like that… It’d be bad having them on the Order’s side in war. Chaos magick may be generally stronger, but the humans’ science allied with the Order’s manpower, then. Well.” 

“Yep,” Ashton says, nodding. Then he takes a deep breath, and yells: “Hey, Haz. The hell are you doing? Stop shoving Dennis.”

Ashton laughs as he says it, but Harry turns to him with alarmed eyes. Dennis gives a triumphant look to Harry, snorting, but Michael’s not fast enough to catch up with the change in the atmosphere. 

He’s still stuck on the premise that they are all very likely going to die.

* * *

It’s much, much later, and Michael realizes he doesn’t know how many days he’s been sharing this cocoon of a bedroom with Luke. It could be a day or three, or four or five, only emerging from the room to get more food, giggling at the eerie times, at having no responsibility, at having no anything, and at the same time, feeling like they’re accomplishing something big. Michael knows Luke wants to help with building the new places for the humans -- he knows every single time they cross paths with someone on their way to go there. But nobody asks Luke or them, so Luke only wraps his arms around Michael and kisses his shoulder. 

As for him, he could proudly say he’s been avoiding thoughts of war and death successfully. He tries to stay clear from everyone, looks both ways before leaving his room, just in case he’d accidentally run into Halsey or Daryl, but he’s under the impression that Halsey is trying to keep to herself as well, and Daryl has more important things to worry about than cornering his son.

It’s his dreams that he cannot escape. That worries him.

They come in chunks, like his memories when he left the Order Prison, but unlike then, they’re all blurry and foggy, make next to no sense at all, and yet he wakes up feeling like he can’t breathe each time. It’s always about the prophecy that he didn’t tell Luke about; it’d felt like there was nothing to tell in the first place, and now he isn’t so sure.

At first, it was his former best friend telling him he’d never be forgiven.

That wasn’t something surprising. If they were to ever meet again, there isn’t a single thing in Michael’s recent decisions that he thinks Calum would approve of. From sleeping with a Chaos witch and loving him, to living in the same house of a handful of murderers. To being a murderer himself, he thinks. He hopes that’s not what Calum is.

Either way, it hadn’t felt like a lot. But his dreams, the constant smell of blood that invades his nostrils and makes it hard to breathe, it tells him otherwise.

Michael wakes up with a headache but not with a start, and that’s good news in his eyes. Luke’s still fast asleep by his side, one of his arms around Michael’s stomach but his face buried in his own pillow. Michael takes a couple of deep breaths, and when it starts feeling like he’s his own person again, not the haunting shadow from his dreams, he gives Luke a half-smile. It’s still late, and he doesn’t know how come his body has adapted to these patterns, with fireflies for a sun, with no watches or clocks around to tell the specific time. But he knows, and his body knows, his heavy eyelids and the way in which he sits down and ruffles Luke’s hair fondly.

It’s late, and he’s just had another nightmare, and it feels like his head might explode.

But it’s not so bad. 

He rubs his eyes, yawns, and leaves the bed.

After a quick trip to the bathroom, washing his face and spending way too long staring at the mirror like it may start giving him answers to questions he hasn’t yet formed, he decides to go for a late night snack. 

Leaving Luke safely tucked in, he closes the door with a soft click.

His mind is still wandering, and the corridor is all dark. He thinks it says something about him and about the place that he doesn’t need the lights to know which way to go, to know to avoid the unevenness of the floor underneath his bare feet. He’s learning more about the house, too, with the passing days, except what’s behind the doors he won’t ever knock on.

Headed for the stairs, he starts his way lazily, still debating whether it’s really such a good idea to just abandon his room, and that’s when he hears a scream.

One of the things he’s learned about the Big House is that no one’s supposed to be screaming.

The sound makes Michael come to an abrupt halt, blinking a couple of times, his heart climbing up his throat. It’s Halsey’s voice, but the scream is muffled. He turns towards her room, trying to swallow the lump in his throat. This is not what was supposed to happen, especially not when he’s all alone. If Jason’s wrong, and it’s Caleb, then at least he’s taken him down once before, even if the element of surprise was a big thing for Caleb to let go of Jack the day they got to Death Valley.

But if it isn’t him… 

Michael doesn’t know. He’ll have to count on the element of surprise once more. 

Approaching Halsey’s bedroom feels like torture, each step both too slow and too fast, like each millisecond that he takes is another where life’s drained out of her. And yet, at the same time, he can’t make his feet move any faster -- as it is, it already sounds like his steps are echoing and vibrating through him and the house. He’s sure everyone will wake up with just how the soles of his feet make the wooden floor creak slightly underneath him. 

Michael takes a deep breath, just about a foot between him and the door.

Halsey lets out a strangled noise.

That’s when adrenaline kicks in. The very thought that if he takes any longer she might be dead by the time he makes it, makes Michael’s eyes roll back. He brings his star-fished hands to touch the door, and with all of its molecules bending under his fingertips, he breathes out heavily, and they break.

Everything breaks.

The molecules, assumedly, but also the door, going up in sudden dust, and it sort of feels like Michael breaks, too, the magick called and used too fast without giving his body any time to adjust. But he ignores the breaking in his bones and in the door, steps inside the room with his uneven breath, and looks at them.

Halsey’s not alone, like Michael knew she wouldn’t be, but the person with her isn’t Caleb. It’s Geordie, with her head between Halsey’s thighs, turning to give Michael the most annoyed look he’s ever seen Geordie give anyone.

He parts his lips, blinking a couple of times. 

Geordie’s head obstructs the view, but the context gives enough away. If not for that, then for Halsey’s dress pulled up to her stomach, and Geordie’s hair a mess. He finds Halsey’s eyes, and she looks flustered, cheeks pink, disoriented but slowly regaining consciousness.

Halsey props up on her elbow, staring at Michael.

“Do you _mind_?” she snorts. Michael blinks a couple more times, and she shakes her head with a sigh, gesturing with her free and for Michael to leave.

Oh, God. He’s broken into the room of the person he was avoiding, and in the process not only destroyed her door, but also walked in on her and Geordie. Michael screws his eyes shut, murmuring, “Shit, shit, shit,” and turns around.

He’s extremely self-conscious of how he exploded the door. He stares down at his fingers, and sure enough, the skin has torn between them. Not enough that it looks like it’ll bleed properly, but enough that it stings a bit now.

Standing in the middle of the corridor, he watches as both his and Daryl’s bedroom doors open. Luke looks like he’s not really awake yet, but his confused frown makes Michael want to hide himself in Luke’s arms so he never has to look at anyone else ever again.

Daryl leaves his bedroom with a massive gun in his hands. He doesn’t look sleepy. Just slightly terrifying.

“I,” Michael shakes his head, gesturing for both of them to stop. They do. Must be sleepiness. “I accidentally blew up a door. It’s no big deal,” he says, pressing his lips together right after.

Luke blinks a couple of times, tilting his head to the side, but seems to relax, resting his frame against the open door. Daryl doesn’t even flinch, just stares at Michael, apparently not sold. “You accidentally blew up a door,” he repeats, slowly. Michael nods, vehemently so. Daryl cocks an eyebrow, and lowers his gun. Michael hadn’t realized it was pointing to his general direction. “Come into my office. I want to talk to you.”

He figures it’s either that, or Daryl walking in on Halsey and Geordie probably still finding clothes or trying to look presentable. Michael nods slowly, and tries to not step on any pieces of broken wood as he reluctantly makes his way to Daryl’s office.

On passing Luke, he’d sort of expected Luke to pull him closer or kiss his cheek or _do something_. But the second Luke’s convinced that there’s no one attacking the house -- on purpose, at least -- he simply turns back into the room. Michael catches sight of him dropping heavily on the bed. Luke doesn’t close the door.

Traitor.

Daryl takes the gun to his office. His back is to Michael even when Michael walks into the office and closes the double doors behind him. Daryl keeps one hand on the gun, the other serving himself something that looks alcoholic and expensive. Something Karen probably has hidden in her bookshelves behind thick books and Michael spent a good while of his life pretending he never knew that was where she kept the strongest stuff.

Taking a deep breath, Michael rubs his eyes. He yawns, and that seems to catch Daryl’s attention. He finally looks over his shoulder at his son, takes a sip of his drink in a thick small glass, and asks: “Were you trying to attack Halsey?”

Michael stares at him.

Yeah, right.

More like trying to save her. From Geordie’s mouth, apparently.

“No,” he says, slowly. “Why would you think that?” he frowns, offended. Daryl properly turns to him now, letting the gun rest on his desk among the coded papers Michael hadn’t understood when he took a look at them a few days ago. Daryl crosses his arms, and cocks an eyebrow. “I mean, yeah, I guess I could see why you would think that. But of course not. Jesus, no, of course not.”

Daryl stares at him. Michael stares back.

“I was not!” he says, louder this time. He spreads his arms, too, like that’s a way of showing a metaphorical white flag. Daryl keeps on studying him, so Michael lowers his head, shaking it to the side a bit, chuckling. “It’s funny, actually, but I don’t think she’d like me to tell you.”

His father still says nothing.

Michael sighs, shifts his weight to the other foot.

“Why would I try to attack her? I _like_ her.”

Daryl opens and closes his mouth, like he hadn’t been expecting that. Michael frowns, because how could he not? But Daryl only blinks a couple of times, and walks around his desk, sitting on the biggest chair, the one closest to the wall. Michael just walks to the desk and sits on the other side without giving it much thought; feels like a logical next step. Daryl presses his lips together, though, takes his time just looking at Michael, and Michael starts feeling fidgety.

“I didn’t mean to blow up the door, though,” he says. “It just happens sometimes. Happened the first few times I used my magick and I’m not entirely sure how to make it stop. Guess I just have to focus more,” he says the last sentence with a small smile, but still staring at his lap. He shrugs, also adds: “Luke keeps telling me to focus. I think that’s what it comes down to: focus.”

He’s aware he’s rambling. He’s also aware that Daryl’s still quiet.

“But sure I like Halsey,” he snorts, spreading his palms on his lap. The spots between his fingers each have a tiny red dot, like someone pressed the tip of a red pen against it, but it doesn’t sting at all anymore. “We may have not gotten along at first, with how you told her to kill my boyfriend and she hated me, but,” he shrugs.

Daryl still doesn’t stop him, so frowning at his lap, he keeps going.

He catches Daryl bringing the glass to his lips once more, but mostly keeps his eyes down, staring at his hands, his thighs, frowning harder, sighing softly.

“Which was fucked up. It was very fucked up. I don’t care that you say it was to protect her. It _was_ fucked up. You made her friendship with Luke feel like a disease they were both suffering from. That was… terrible,” he sighs, staring down. He grabs his knees, and keeps going. “I don’t understand how you could’ve done that… I mean, you seem to care about her. So _if_ you care about her, then… Why would you do that, why would--”

Finally interrupting him, Daryl asks: “What is it going to take for you to believe me, that I care about both of you? You’re my children, Michael. I’ve lost enough.”

The way he sounds when he says that is unnerving.

Michael looks at him again, startled. It isn’t that what he says doesn’t ring true. It’s just the desperation in the last few words, how it’s said between gritted teeth, and the parts that he isn’t saying as well. Michael can’t help feeling a little sick, a little nauseated, and suddenly it’s not funny at all, none of it is. He couldn’t keep it to the basics, couldn’t have just joked it off without having the weight of bitterness make its appearance. It’s just not who he is, and most of all, not what he wants from this.

From this relationship.

Because if anything, Daryl is his father. There is something he wants from this relationship, and though he may not have come to terms with all the details yet, he knows it’s not just sleeping in his house and eating his food.

“You’ve lost enough,” Michael repeats, slowly, daring to make eye-contact even though it doesn’t feel like he’s earned it. 

“I have,” Daryl looks away, and then back at Michael. 

It takes a few seconds of feeling the thickness in the air before Michael connects the dots, before he’s staring at Daryl again with a frown, without knowing how to make the words come out, but feeling them echoing in his head in anticipation anyway. He clears his throat a couple of times, feels the words eventually come back to him.

“Did I have… brothers or sisters?” he asks, quietly. Daryl meets his eyes, and he feels the need to add, a little rushedly: “I know about Halsey, but I mean… You know what I mean.”

He’s nervous. Of course he’s nervous.

He’s nervous, because for what feels like the thousandth time, his life is going to fall apart. It’d been feeling that way for a long time, since that day in the prison, or even way before that. Maybe from the day he’s blown up that table and Karen had looked at him like he was doomed… that was the day it started, and from then on, it hadn’t really stopped. But this still feels different.

This is like death in reverse.

First he dies, then he slowly walks away from death knowing what’s to come, or what came before. In this case, he’s not really sure. In this case, he’s just staring at Daryl and waiting for his answer as Daryl presses his lips together and sighs softly.

“Yes, you did,” he says.

Michael snorts. 

His knee-jerk reaction to finding out he used to have siblings is snorting and wanting to punch a hole in the wall. He wants to flip Daryl’s desk and cry and yell. But he doesn’t do any of that, just the snort. All he does is snort and tilt his head to the side, and slowly, very slowly, like he’s only now learning the words, he says:

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Daryl closes his eyes for a second, and says: “It’s not the way you think it is. Karen is not… She wasn’t the mother.”

“Still, you should have told me,” Michael snorts again, standing up abruptly. 

He wants to leave. He can’t be in the same place as his father anymore.

“Michael,” Daryl says, warningly, the way he calls all his Champions when he’s establishing his authority. But it doesn’t work this time, because Michael is nobody’s Champion and he’s nobody’s nothing, because he used to have siblings but doesn’t anymore, and Daryl should’ve told him but didn’t. “Michael,” he repeats, this time standing up as well. 

“No, don’t,” Michael turns away, frowning. “You don’t get to say anything, alright? You should’ve told me.”

“Right,” Daryl says, raising his voice as well. He’s cocking an eyebrow like Michael does, too, when he’s more angry than hurt, and of course Michael sees that, notices the patterns that silly ignorant biology passed on to him from his father. “I should’ve just told you when you got here, is that so?” he snorts. Just like Michael snorts, too, he knows. It only makes him angrier, which is alright, he supposes -- it takes up some of the room the hurt had been taking. “Welcome, nice to meet you! And by the way, let’s talk about all the tragedy that you missed out on!”

Michael clenches his fists, staring at Daryl. His eyes burn, his nostrils burn, and it takes him a solid moment to realize it’s because he’s going to cry. Instead of letting it happen, his shoulders tense, his nails leaving half-moon marks in his palms. “It could’ve meant something to me. And I never knew about it.”

Daryl’s voice is thick with bitterness when he raises an eyebrow, tilting his head to the side, saying: “And whose fault is that? That you didn’t have a father? Mine or Karen’s?”

It’s pathetic.

Michael knows it’s petty, too.

It shows his age more than any other thing.

But all he can bring himself to do is snort and shake his head, flip him off, turn away, and leave. It may be pathetic and petty and childish, but it’s his knee-jerk reaction, and he goes with it.


	25. ladies and gentlemen: truth is now acceptable

“Thought I’d find you here.”

Michael blinks a couple of times before he looks over his shoulder to find Halsey standing behind him. It isn’t that he’s startled, only that he wasn’t expecting company. Not her, anyway. Maybe Daryl. But he supposes after flipping him off and walking away, Daryl wouldn’t be eager to spend some quality time with him.

Michael snorts, because he’s on the roof of the Big House, and he’s absolutely sure that Halsey did not expect to find him there, either. He just keeps his eyes ahead, and repeats: “You thought you’d find me here.” 

She shrugs. 

She’s wearing a floral dress that looks absolutely alien on her, but looks like something Geordie would wear. It goes all the way to her knees, all orange and pink, colors too bright and vivid for the faded fireflies in the sky that this late look like it’s just a couple of inches above their heads. Halsey sits next to him, their legs hanging but it still doesn’t feel dangerous. 

They don’t touch and, for a second, don’t talk, either.

Then she says: “Alright, I had no idea where you’d be. But you weren’t in your room and you weren’t in the kitchen, and I took a look around town and you weren’t anywhere, so I figured maybe Luke had shown you the roof,” she says, quiet and staring ahead, too. Michael just nods, but offers her nothing else. She adds: “Luke’s an idiot, by the way. Who in their right mind sleeps with the bedroom door open? If they do have a door, that is.”

Michael can’t help the chuckle that escapes his lips, embarrassed and small, and turns to her with an apologetic look. “I’m sorry about that. I just thought… I mean, I heard something, and then… then I blew up your door. I’m sorry.”

She smirks up at him. “It’s alright. I’ll just find a new one tomorrow, and change it myself.”

“Very resourceful,” he says, looking away from her again.

She winks, like it’s a funny comment to make, and she’s playing along. “Someone has a new haircut. I’m going to assume you met Harry,” she states, matter-of-factly, not really seeming to care much for a confirmation. Michael still nods with a vague smile. 

Halsey’s blue hair is up in a loose bun, and she doesn’t look as tired as she had last time they’d properly talked. It’s been about a week, a week and a half, Michael isn’t keeping track because if he does, he feels worse about avoiding her. So instead he just keeps his eyes low, staring at his feet and the several feet between his and the ground. Death Valley looks at its quietest like this, and he thinks he likes it that way. 

“I have to tell you something,” Michael says.

Sighing softly, she nods. “Figured that much. Is now the time?”

“As good as any,” he shrugs. She smiles quietly, and her calmness is nauseating. He wants to tell her that he’s going to break her heart, tell her adopted father is a manipulative asshole, but instead what he does is go straight for the kill, so she can decide how to uneven her breath later. “Daryl knew you wouldn’t kill Luke. He was counting on you failing, so he’d be in a comfortable position to pick someone else for Head Champion.”

It takes him a second to look back at her. It feels like forever, really, because she says nothing and he doesn’t, either; feels like he’s said too much already. But when he does look at her, forces himself to hold his breath and look her way, she’s frowning and staring ahead, like she’s trying to make some sense of this, like she’s still processing.

“Why?” 

Michael shrugs. “Told me he wanted to keep you safe from what’s to come,” he pauses, looks away again. “Ashton thinks something big is coming, too. I don’t know what to tell you, because honestly, I don’t know what to believe.”

Halsey stays quiet for another second, the frown in her forehead growing deeper.

Then she blinks a couple of times, turns to him.

“You know what,” she starts, then shakes her head. “No, I mean, it’s so fucked up, you know? Because I get it. That’s the worst part. I do get it.”

Michael stares at her, raising both eyebrows. “He lied to you.” 

“And I’m saying I get that,” Halsey says, slowly, looking away from him and to the city again, a long look as if she’s drinking in the sight. “He’s trying to keep you here too, isn’t he? He’ll chain us both to a bed if it means we’ll stay safe in Death Valley while everyone else dies.” 

Snorting, he tilts his head to the side. “And you’re okay with that.”

“No, I’m not saying I think it’s right. I’m saying I get it,” she states. But Michael sees past that.

Michael sees past that in the sense that he thinks he _gets_ it too, not Daryl’s motives but hers. He sees the pride in her eyes as she tilts her chin up, smugness spreading over her expression that she’s cared for. That someone would love her so much they’d lie to keep her safe. And it’s wrong, they both know it is, but when there isn’t a whole lot of parental love going around, a little can be a lot.

Michael gets that. And he hates that he gets that.

Instead of dwelling on it, he says, matter-of-factly: “Apparently Daryl had more children.”

“Yes,” she says.

Michael cocks an eyebrow, chuckling lowly. “Of course you know about it.” She shrugs, eyes on the city, everywhere but on him, and Michael swallows something bitter that insists on crawling back to his tongue. “Was it more than one? He didn’t… it wasn’t clear.”

“Two, yeah,” Halsey says, carefully. “A girl and a boy. But I don’t think I’m the one you should be talking about this. You should discuss that with Daryl, not me.”

All pride has vanished from her face. 

“A girl and a boy?” he raises his eyebrows. He feels a little dizzy, wants to smile but not really, because these siblings aren’t his to claim; they’re not… they aren’t, anymore. “Were they twins?”

“No,” she says, and presses her lips together for a second. Something ugly twists her face before she speaks again, but she still takes a deep breath and says: “She was older, a lot older. Older than you. Was born before you, at least. He wasn’t. He was a baby.” 

It makes him want to cry, but instead he begs: “Tell me more about them?”

“I’d really rather not,” she says, carefully, and Michael frowns and stares, but she still doesn’t flinch. “Last thing I want to do is talk about Scarlet.”

He stops. Something in his stomach turns. He forces it all back down, all the feelings and the uneasiness. Trying to keep his voice steady, trying to stop his hands from shaking, he says, slowly: “Jason told me about a Scarlet. Could be a different one. He said this Scarlet,” Michael clears his throat, an unplanned pause, raises his eyebrows. Halsey tilts her chin up just a bit, like she doesn’t want to listen, but does anyway. “This Scarlet tried to burn down the Big House. He said that she… that she left.”

Halsey presses her lips together and then snorts. “That’s one way to put it,” she shrugs. “Jason doesn’t have all his facts right, though. He wasn’t here yet, so he couldn’t know. She didn’t try to burn down the whole house. She just tried to burn my room, with me locked inside.”

She stares at him, then, defiantly, as if she’s daring him to insist on the subject.

He wouldn’t dream on such thing.

Maybe it’s a good thing he and his sister never met. Maybe it’s a good thing that Scarlet never had the chance to hurt him the way she tried to hurt Halsey. It still hurts like a motherfucker, all the same, and he lowers his head, murmurs, “I’m sorry,” because he feels responsible somehow, because in a way, he feels like she was his and he was hers, even though they’d never come to meet, and he isn’t directly to blame for what happened or almost did.

“Not your fault,” she says, shrugging once more and looking away. “But I still see that crazy bitch’s face in my head whenever I close my eyes. Been forever, but I still do. I’ll never stop seeing her.”

Michael searches her eyes. 

He isn’t sure what is it that he’s searching for, but it’s fruitless anyway. She only presses her lips together and tries to make it seem like she’ll be smiling soon, but he doesn’t think she will, not unless he changes the subject. 

It feels like something’s crawling under his skin, but he ignores it.

Nodding slowly, he says: “So, Geordie.”

His smirk is met with Halsey’s outraged look and a slap on his shoulder. “Shut up, Michael.”

Michael laughs quietly, rubbing the hit spot, even though it doesn’t hurt and she hadn’t meant it to -- he’s seen what it looks like, when her hands are weapons. It makes him think back of sad, brutal things, so he takes another deep breath, and tries to focus on something different. 

“It’s been about a week. Annika and Nate still aren’t here. Think they bailed?”

Halsey snorts, and shifts uncomfortably by his side. Her shoulder brushes his, and it doesn’t make him want to flinch away. She stares down at her feet, and shakes her head. “You don’t know them. Nothing would make any of them bail on Death Valley, on Daryl. Annika is so willing to die for this city, that the only logical reason for her to not be here yet is that she’s dead already.”

“Is that what you think happened?” he asks, voice lower.

She shrugs. 

He can feel the warmth coming from her body, so close to his. It makes him feel funny, like this is his sister, even though he doesn’t know what the title entails, and never known at all. He bites back the dorky smile that has no place in this conversation, and stares ahead, down at the city. “What happens now, then?”

It takes her a moment. “I think… I think Daryl wants either Nate or Annika to be his new Head Champion. Otherwise he wouldn’t still be waiting. But everyone’s a little nervous with how long it’s been. They’re not comfortable with waiting. Nobody is. Waiting is bad in war.”

Michael tilts his head down, staring at her, until she meets his eyes. “Which doesn’t answer my question. What happens now?”

She gives him a small smile. “Wolf barbecue tomorrow at Benji and Cameron’s, I guess. Beyond that, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. We wait until they come back, and everyone keeps convincing each other we can’t go after them, and that’s it.”

“Wolf barbecue,” Michael repeats slowly, then snorts. “That’s something I didn’t think I’d ever eat,” he pauses, and she half-smiles, shrugging again. They hold eye-contact for a second, and Michael thinks she knows what’s coming even before he does, because her face gets serious and she puts a stray of hair that escaped her bun behind her ear. Michael clears his throat, looks away very briefly, and then asks: “Do you miss anything about it? About being Order?”

He didn’t have to add the last part. She’d know.

Michael thinks maybe he’d just missed saying the word Order without having the context mean it’s something dirty. God, he knows he does. He misses the simplicity and the ignorance, and his friends, and even the stupid school. Most of all, he misses Karen.

That was the best thing that came with being Order: being her son. 

“Not really,” she says, fast, and Michael snorts, because it’s _too_ fast, like she’d rehearsed saying this out loud too many times to be true. “I like it here,” she says, slowly, looking away from him and back at the city. Then she takes a deep breath, shrugs for the third time within minutes, and rests her head on Michael’s shoulder. It makes him bite back a weird sense of pride instead of a smile, but he keeps quiet, and lets her go on. “My biological parents… my connection to Order… Because, you see, that’s all the connection I have with Order: them. My magick isn’t Order. Daryl shaped it too much to be anything but the most concentrated powerful Chaos,” she singsongs the last few words, and Michael smiles, because he can hear the smile in her voice too. She sighs softly. “My parents were biochemical engineers. They worked in an old government facility that doesn’t exist anymore, way east. I never lived in the city, but it wasn’t a small town by any means. We had lots there. What we had most was laboratories.”

“Did you leave, or did they make you leave?”

“Isn’t it just the same?” she snorts, but doesn’t raise her head from Michael’s shoulder. “I was too young to remember how old I was. All I know is the TV spoke a lot about how Chaos was made of evil killers, and Order was going to keep us safe, and then I leave the reception lobby one day to go look for mommy and daddy, and they’re in their laboratory, dissecting a person.”

Michael raises his eyebrows, more at the casualness in her voice than at the content of her words. He isn’t naive enough to ask more about their jobs, or about their supposed jobs, so he just stays quiet, hoping the truth isn’t as bad as the possibilities he’s cooking up in his head.

It takes her a moment to go on.

“I didn’t… understand at first. But I started paying attention to small things, like all the grown-up conversations around me, like how someone in the Council kept calling them. Then I heard Daryl’s name. My mother telling my father that they should find and kill Daryl by any means necessary. Said that they’d look good for the Council if they managed to do it the smart way, as scientists, get there before the army did. Now let me ask you, Michael: does looking good for someone seem like a good enough reason to kill someone? We were supposed to be the good guys.”

Though she still doesn’t sound shaken, and he still doesn’t know what moves him as much as he wishes he did, he sighs, and brings his arm to around her shoulder. She seems to relax a bit, and he rubs her shoulder as soothingly as he can. 

“So you left.”

“I ran. But fate’s a funny thing, and when Daryl found a hungry dirty Order little girl lost in the woods just outside of town, instead of killing her, he took her in. Changed his plans to attack the town that day, instead took me back to Death Valley. Chaos never attacked the town I was born in, and I got a new life in Death Valley.”

Michael raises his eyebrows. “Well--” he tries.

She interrupts him.

“No, that’s not… it was stupid of Daryl. I see that now. If only I hadn’t complained so much about being hungry, about being cold… in retrospect, I could’ve taken it, you know? I could’ve just held on and they should’ve attacked the town. So many scientists… they should’ve. Daryl shouldn’t have been so soft. He ruined everything that night that he decided they should go back.”

It makes him frown, feeling something weird and restless in his chest.

If before, as she realized her parents’ characters, her voice had lacked the trauma, right now, as she speaks, her voice is full of crushing and overwhelming guilt. It makes listening to her difficult, because that’s the one thing he can’t deal with: guilt. He can’t tell her how to get rid of it if he hasn’t figured it out for himself yet.

But he knows he never wants to hear that tone of voice again.

She raises her head from Michael’s shoulder, looks at him.

“I’ve been thinking about it. More than I used to, I mean. It’s my fault,” she says, nodding slowly. Michael’s frown grows deeper, and he shakes his head carefully, trying to voice his thoughts of not understanding without opening his mouth. “What happened to Luke. That’s on me.”

“So much has happened to Luke. You’re gonna have to be more specific, Halz,” Michael tries, a lame attempt at humor that has her raising her eyebrows instead of laughing.

“It was my parents, Michael. It was them. They were part of the team that developed the drug that Luke ended up taking, and they were in the human laboratory, slicing fourteen year old Luke up. Daryl found them. He recognized them from a picture I brought to Death Valley.”

It was never clear to Michael how come that the humans were able to intercept an Order group that held Luke and Jack prisoner. It’d seem like too much, humans with no magick only taking Order witches out with guns. Even the most powerful of them can be useless against some types of Order magick. It’d seemed to him, too, that it wasn’t just him: that everyone found it confusing that humans were able to do such a thing. It makes more sense now, to think that people like Halsey’s parents, Order-born witches, had for some reason turned on Order and started working on humans instead. 

He doesn’t think it’s something everyone knows, though.

Michael holds his breath, or maybe it’s just that his brain stops seeing breathing as something reasonable. He presses his lips together, and keeps staring at her, because he can’t bring himself to do anything else. Then his voice comes, and it isn’t what he’d wanted to say at all.

“What did he do to your parents?”

“The only thing he could’ve done to take Luke out of there alive,” she shrugs, and without breaking eye-contact, adds: “Daryl killed them.”

* * *

Benji and Cameron’s house is big, if anything by Death Valley standards. It isn’t as big as the house where Daryl and his Champions live, but then again, it wasn’t made for as many people either. What he gets from the get-go is that this is what luxury in Death Valley is supposed to look like -- ample rooms, the closest thing to a garden you can have when no grass would grow in the arid ground, cacti in rows around a big grill that up until that point had looked unused. Now there’s coal and fire, massive chunks of red meat stuck in metal sticks as Benji turns them around from time to time.

None of it is like Michael would’ve expected, but he’s not complaining. He’d happily go along with any promises of simpler times coming.

Cameron is not the hostess he’d expected either. Contrary to the only two times he’d heard of her before, both times as being angry at her husband, she looks at him lovingly, smiles at all their guests, and seems to make it seem like they’re in an Order TV commercial. She’s a couple of inches taller than Benji, her hair short to her shoulders but very straight and blond, her eyes blindingly blue, but her skin is darker than Benji’s and she has a distinct accent. “Cuban,” she says, smiling sweetly at Michael, when he bizarrely blurts out the question of where exactly is she from. Michael thinks he’s growing too comfortable, definitely, but even though there are new people here, it still feels a little bit like home. Death Valley does, apparently.

He came with Luke, dragged out of bed in what felt like too early, with Luke too excited for Michael to groan and crawl back to under the sheets. Ashton isn’t here but Harry is, as well as Dennis and Tati, predictably, Joel, Nicole, and of course, Benji. “Did someone invite Halsey?” Michael asks, close to Luke’s ear.

Luke shakes his head. “She and Cam don’t get along.”

Michael doesn’t ask why.

For a solid half hour, Michael keeps mostly to himself, leaning against Luke for either support or lack of better thing to do. Cameron seems to divide her time equally between everyone there, including her nephew and niece. But with Nicole around, Tati doesn’t even leave her side. Nicole is significantly shorter than Cameron, and than Joel, too. Her skin is dark and her eyes are a light shade of brown, hair cut messily but in a way that somehow makes her look good. Her eyes are big and round, her nose long and pointed. She nods acknowledging at Michael a couple of times, but mostly just pays attention to Tati.

Luke and Michael are by the grill with Benji, and Benji’s telling a funny story about when Luke supposedly took out a wolf by himself but was too scrawny to take the wolf back to Death Valley, so Benji and Joel had to go back to the woods to find it. Michael’s smiling, his face pressed against Luke’s shoulder as he listens to it, his arms wrapped around Luke’s middle, enjoying the warmth coming from him.

“I wasn’t that small,” Luke interferes.

Benji stares at them with his eyebrows raised.

“You tell yourself that,” Benji says.

Michael tilts his head to the side to look at his boyfriend, smirking. “You’re taller than me -- and I’m six feet tall. It’s just hard to imagine you _small_.”

Just to spite him, Luke goes and suddenly does look small. He shrugs, looking down, his cheeks blushing furiously, and it takes Michael everything to not just kiss that shyness off his face. It hurts his face, the way he smiles at Luke and shakes his head slowly, tearing his gaze away from him because if he doesn’t, he’ll end up making out with Luke in front of everyone. Again.

Nicole is sitting on a long bench with Tati on her lap. She’s got both of her hands on her daughter’s belly, and she’s rubbing it in a way that makes Tati giggle. Cameron’s sitting next to her, and even though Tati’s laughing, the women seem serious. They’re both looking at Michael but, when he looks, Cameron just smiles at him, and Nicole quickly looks away.

He frowns, but ends up smiling back just because.

“Benji,” Harry says, walking to them. Dennis follows closely behind. “Where’s Ash?”

“None of your business,” Benji answers, smiling in a way that makes it look like he doesn’t know. Harry narrows his eyes, and Benji shrugs, cracking a smile. “Gotta ask him yourself later, ‘suppose.”

Harry whines, dropping his head back.

Frustrated, he parts his lips, another argument to press for Ashton’s whereabouts in the tip of his tongue, but Dennis turns to Michael, and with one eyebrow raised and no hesitation at all, he asks: “Do you know where Harry’s brother is?” 

Michael shakes his head no, frowning.

Dennis sighs heavily, then turns back to Harry. “Let’s enjoy the barbecue then, alright? We’ll see Ashton later,” he says. Harry shifts his weight to the other foot, staring down, and Dennis tugs at his shirt until Harry looks at him again. Harry’s got a couple of inches on him, but their postures still make it seem like Dennis is taller. “Dude,” he says, matter-of-factly.

Harry sighs softly, nodding slowly at Dennis. “Alright,” he snorts. “The steak better be good, Benji!”

“Pfft,” Benji rolls his eyes, takes a couple of steps forward, and slaps the back of Harry’s head. “Respect, kid,” he says, but he sounds goodhearted, and even as he rubs the spot that was hit, Harry’s grinning. Michael smiles at him, too.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Luke disappears.

It takes Michael a solid minute to realize Luke’s vanished from his side and walked away. He’d been looking at Benji and the kids interacting, how easily their banter flows, a little jealous of a male figure to look up to growing up, a little just happy that Harry and Dennis can have that in both Joel and Benji -- and Ashton, for Harry, to an extent -- even though he still thinks that Dennis’ attitude toward him isn’t the most friendly.

Then he finds Luke, sitting on the ground and spreading his arms for Tati. She jumps on him from Nicole’s shoulders, and Nicole seems to only notice when her child has already left. She smirks up at Tati as she lands on Luke’s chest, sending him down, and then her attention is back on Cameron. 

Luke stays down, lying flat on his back with his knees bent, and Tati sitting on his stomach. He’s laughing at something she said, and she looks smug, blinking vertically at him and tilting her head to the side charmingly. She is charming, Michael decides, in a way that not everyone is ready at first. But she did inherit that charm from her father -- Nicole looks nothing but threatening, even though she’s so small.

Joel’s inside getting what he calls wine but Luke had told him isn’t really the wine he’s used to, and isn’t alcoholic, either, for that matter, just a beverage they’ve developed in there with some abundant dry fruit that’s strong enough to leave you making a face. He sort of wishes he could talk to Joel about his family, about the city, about what would his plans be for them if it was a real possibility to leave. 

Harry and Dennis are drifting off, orbiting around each other and getting further away from the rest of them, so in a way, it’s only Benji and Michael now. Michael looks at the meat because it feels strange to look at someone he isn’t so close to in the eye, or it feels strange right now, in this atmosphere of familiarity. But then Benji says, bluntly:

“Cameron needs to talk to you, later. Alone.”

Michael raises his eyebrows. “Your wife,” he says, but in reality he’s asking.

Benji keeps his eyes to the wolf meat he’s turning around in the grill. “Yep.”

He narrows his eyes, looking at the meat, too, both of them staring at it and thinking about different things. Michael may not know what’s going on on Benji’s head, but he knows his is a perfect sight for a new thunderstorm. Just when he was getting used to faux suburban peace.

“Okay,” he says, and, just to have something to add: “I’m glad you two seem to be okay now, though. That time we had breakfast with Jack, Joel said something about you sleeping on the couch,” he forces himself to laugh, even though he feels nervous now.

Benji sighs, shrugging. “Still sleeping on the couch. I don’t know, I think this may be the end of us.” Michael parts his lips, looking at him abruptly, and Benji looks back at him. “I know. She’s been all loving and shit. But that’s for the kids’ benefit. It’ll break their hearts if they know what’s happening, what’s about to happen.”

He wants to convince himself that it’s none of his business.

But what he says is: “What happened?”

“War,” Benji smiles, easily and empty at the same time. Michael frowns, parts his lips again, and again Benji interrupts him. “Look, I’m not supposed to say anything, but my family knows already, and you’ll know as soon as Annika and Nate are back. Annika will be the new Head Champion; this is why Daryl is waiting for them to return for the announcement dinner.”

Raising his eyebrows, he asks: “And you know this how?”

“Because I’ll be his second in command,” Benji says, looking Michael in the eye. “Annika will lead the Champions, and I’ll be leading the old crew into the city first. Daryl, me, some people you don't know.” 

Michael frowns, and takes a step back.

It’s because it feels as if he’s been punched in the chest.

“It’s a suicide mission. He’ll be killed. Daryl will be -- no, _you_ , you’ll be killed too,” he blinks a couple of times, the shock making his shoulders feel stiff. Benji shakes his head, tries talking, but Michael forces his voice to keep low, and says: “Look, that’s why she’s pissed, isn’t it? She knows it’s suicide. And you must know it too. But you… I mean, it’s your life, alright? But he’s… I just found out I have a dead pair of siblings. I can’t have a dead father, too. I had a dead father all my life, and I can’t let that happen again.”

His voice is broken. His eyes are all teared up. 

He’s _choked up_ and feels like there’s fire in his throat. 

But he’s not thinking about how he shouldn’t feel that way about Daryl. All he needs is for Benji to know that this is wrong. But Benji only presses his lips together and looks away, like it’s not up to him. “We’re doing this for you all, Michael. For the future. We’re doing this so when the Champions come next, you guys have a fighting chance.”

Michael sets his jaw, and stares at Benji.

It doesn’t feel like a good enough answer at all.

* * *

They don’t eat outside, because it wouldn’t be comfortable. Instead, they can all be uncomfortable in the kitchen. The table has only six chairs, so the three couples eat together while the children are sitting in chairs in front of the kitchen cabinet. Michael’s sitting between Joel and Luke, and he doesn’t think he ever wants to be that close to Joel again. Nothing personal, of course, it just feels weird, bumping elbows with someone who looks so used to it, being so little used to it himself.

Mostly, his head is just not there, not since Benji said what he had. He keeps avoiding Benji’s eyes and looking back at Luke, because he needs to tell him, tell him about dead Scarlet and dead little brother too, none of which he had time. Or maybe he had, just it didn’t feel appropriate.

But if Daryl’s suddenly to go on a suicide mission, especially now, Luke needs to know, so he can help Michael stop him. In his head, that’s doable. In his head, it’s simply bound to happen, to work out. The past few weeks have been peaceful, building to a sense of home that he isn’t willing to let Daryl tear apart by getting himself killed.

Cameron looks at him. She just keeps looking at him.

When he looks back, she smiles.

Nicole clears her throat.

“You haven’t touched your steak, Michael,” the shorter woman says, raising an eyebrow. She looks like she means to be smiling, but the information got lost somewhere before her brain could signal the muscles in her face. 

Michael parts his lips, looks at Joel by his side for rescue, but he only gives Nicole a loving little smile, like he sees past the eminent threat that shadows her eyes. He turns to Luke, too, but he’s too excited with his own steak to even bother looking back at Michael.

He’s equal parts annoyed and endeared.

“I’ll eat,” he promises, nodding slowly, because he isn’t sure what else he’s supposed to do. “I was just getting started with the soup. Really good, by the way. Delicious,” he smiles back at Cameron, because she properly smiles, even if it’s just with her lips and not with her eyes as well. “That’s a lovely house, by the way.”

“Thank you,” she says, slowly, turning to Benji.

There it is. The challenge, the dare, the one thing she allows herself to do now that the children aren’t looking. It must escape her that Michael and Luke aren’t that much older than her niece and nephew(s). 

In response, Benji just sets his jaw, takes him a moment, then eventually tells Michael: “Joel and I built it, but I drew it. Used to like building houses. Kind of a nice hobby to have, and helps the other people in here, so,” he shrugs. But it’s not what he wants to say. Michael doesn’t need to know him that much to know that this is being used against him -- that this is Cameron showing him that he’s needed here.

Michael wishes he would listen to her, to himself.

Instead he just presses his lips together.

“Benji’s the real artist, you know what I’m saying? And then you have me with stick figures, which is the best I can do,” Joel shrugs. Everyone smiles, and Luke snorts, shaking his head. 

It’s a split second where the nice atmosphere that had engulfed them is back. Nicole’s smiling at her husband, Cameron has her eyebrows raised fondly, Benji rolling his eyes with a smile of smugness plastered to his face, even if he still looks a little unsure about whether he should. Luke, especially, looks so happy, smiling and constantly looking over his shoulder, at Joel and Nicole’s kids and Ashton’s brother. Probably just making sure they’re still there, still safe, that they’re all still there and safe.

Michael takes the distraction to steal glance at Cameron. He wonders if what she wants to talk about has to do with what Benji told him -- Benji must think it does, anyway.

He supposes he’s going to find out.


	26. stay free: don't go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my, it's been so long since i last updated! trust me, i've missed writing in this story so much. hopefully there are still some of you out there!! *w* ah shit, and today is christmas eve. merry christmas eve to all of you who celebrate it!!!!!!!! and i hope if you don't you have a very nice day regardless. title from gerard way's "no show". i love you all very much, and can't tell you how happy i am to be updating. hope you enjoy it!! ❤ ❤ ❤

The excuse is that he’d help wash the dishes. Michael was sure he’d be called on it, that Luke would look at him weird or that Joel would sigh, or that Dennis, definitely Dennis, would have to say something. But nobody says or asks anything about that. 

Benji says he’s got a football and Harry and Dennis are both excited to play. Joel says Benji sucks at the game, Luke furthers the teasing, so all of them end up rushing back outside, Tati on their trail, leaving Michael and the two women inside.

It makes him uncomfortable, taking dishes to the sink without saying a word, without looking back, because for all of Cameron’s loving and approving looks that are Nicole’s encrypted ones that he can’t crack. They help him with some minor chit-chat though, conversation going between them that he takes no part in -- Cameron asks Nicole whether she thinks Ashton will take Harry from their house or he’ll continue to live there. Nicole says she doubts Ashton’s staying, all things considered, but they don’t say what are these things, or include Michael in the conversation at all.

When they’re done, Michael looks at Cameron, questioningly.

She smiles at him. Nicole walks back to the now clear table, and sits down. Michael clears his throat, unsure, but Cameron just puts a hand on his shoulder, and says: “Nicole stays.” 

So Nicole stays.

He walks with her back to the table, and sits down too. “Um, Benji said you wanted to talk to me,” he starts, a bit nervously, because Nicole still isn’t smiling. Cameron nods cautiously, and Michael sighs. “Look, I know what it is about. And I think I’m willing… I’m willing to do whatever you want me to do to stop them. Not a fan of suicide missions. So, yeah, _whatever_ it is, I’ll do it.”

Nicole frowns, looking at Cameron, and for a second they just exchange a look that makes Michael even more nervous, even more confused, feeling even more like the child among adults. Then Cameron cracks a tiny smile, and says: “I don’t think you know what this is about.”

“Benji said he’s going… He said you knew,” he says, looking from one to the other.

Nicole narrows her eyes, then looks back at Cameron. “He thinks it’s about Daryl’s mission in the city. The one that’s bound to fail,” she explains. Cameron parts her lips, looking a little puzzled, and then Nicole turns back to Michael, giving Cameron the time to sit as well, by her side and across from Michael. “That’s not what this is about, Michael. Benji, Daryl, Matt, Jeremiah, Billy, Nancy… They want to die? They die. This is bigger than them, bigger than us.”

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

He feels the blood in his veins speed up, like his heart is bombing it so hard he doesn’t know to breathe in or out anymore, doesn’t need to, oxygen no longer a need so much as a luxury. But he still doesn’t feel like panicking, still doesn’t let himself lose control.

Mostly, he’s just incredulous.

“Wait a second,” Michael shakes his head, snorting, raising his palm. Nicole blinks, startled by the interruption. “What the hell are you saying? That I’m just supposed to let my father go into a suicide mission? Why aren’t any of you trying to talk some sense into them? Don’t you care for Benji at least?!”

“Now he’s _father_ ,” Nicole snorts, raising her eyebrows.

“Of course we care about Benji,” Cameron says, at the same time. “I love him. He’s my husband. And so does Nic and Joel. We’re trying the way we can, but as I’m sure you understand, family is more complicated than forcing people to do what you see is right but they don’t,” she says, tilting her head to the side a bit. Michael stops himself so he won’t snort again. Cameron clears her throat. “Either way, like Nicole said, it’s not about that. It’s not about their mission. But if it makes you feel any better, they know they’re going to fail.”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s logic, with the size of the Order army, how well-guarded the city is, but,” Michael shakes his head.

Nicole comes closer to him, her big round eyes narrowed. “That’s not what she’s saying. They’re going to _fail_. This mission accomplishes nothing. Cam has seen it happen.”

Michael blinks a couple of times, feels his breath catch.

“You’ve been with The Trinity,” he says, raising an eyebrow, because in a way, he supposes he should’ve seen it coming. 

It’s just that there’s something about Cameron and the way she talks and looks and even breathes. There’s something almost cosmic about it, so unnerving and above everything. It’s sort of how he remembers his short encounter with The Trinity as well. Only he didn’t get to carry her mysterious light with him when she was done with him, when they were. He came out of it confused and frowning, remembering something that couldn’t possibly be relevant enough to be shown the way it was. Then came the dreams, the nightmares, the same scene on a loop to be lived all over again every or almost every night.

He presses his lips together, looking at her in a different light. 

Nicole nods slowly, and Cameron looks away.

“It’s time he knows anyway,” she says, telling her friend. 

Cameron gives her a brief look, a curt nod, and then her eyes are back on Michael. “There isn’t much to tell, really, but,” she shrugs, smiling sheepishly. Michael finds that hard to believe. “I’ve seen a couple of things, but it’s no secret. Most of what I’ve seen has already happened anyway.”

Michael cocks an eyebrow. “Such as?”

She rolls her eyes. “A lot, I don’t know,” she turns to Nicole for reference. Nicole gives her a pressed smile that Michael can’t decode; maybe it means she’ll take no part in this, maybe it means just sympathy. He doesn’t know any of them enough to tell. Cameron looks back at Michael, putting a stray of blond hair behind her ear. “You care about the ones that include you the most, don’t you? Those are the ones you want to hear about?”

He snorts. “So now it’s more than one vision you were shown?”

“As it always was,” she says, simply. Michael feels his stomach flip. The way her eyes are heavy on him, it makes him feel both anxiety and fear. He couldn’t really explain it if he tried. “I was the one who saw Luke breaking you out of the Order Prison in safety, before I even met Luke, much less you. I was the one who saw you break this city free from its curse of being underground and in constant state of fear, too. I saw you conquer a space above the ground for us all, Michael.”

His heart speeds up, harder than before.

It’s insane how quick it happens; a shot of adrenaline up his veins, and suddenly his hands are shaking slightly with the pressure of standing still, gravity taking its toll in keeping him unmoving, but at the same time seemingly against laws of nature. It cannot be natural to be still, staring at Cameron, reading truth in her eyes, and still doing nothing about it. 

In his head, he knows it’s not normal for her to have seen at least three visions -- Luke rescuing him, Daryl’s mission not making a difference, and Michael succeeding as the so-called prince of Death Valley. But that’s not what he asks about. Instead, with his voice shaky and his hands increasingly worse, what he asks is:

“Tell me about it, about the future.”

She licks her lips, closes her eyes, and breathes out heavily. Nicole adjusts herself uncomfortably next to her, but Cameron doesn’t even seem to notice her. She breathes in again, and this time her chest inflates, and she doesn’t let go for several seconds. Across the table, she grabs Michael’s arm. Her hands are cold, fingers wrapping around his wrists like claws, but the second he stares at them, are missed seconds he can’t take back.

It’s strange, unlike anything he’s ever had happen to him, the encounter with The Trinity included. Her fingers are icy cold and it’s as if it freezes his veins. He breathes harder, lips parted and throat dry, and then, out of nowhere, something flows from her fingers inside him, and it hurts like a punch in the chest. 

He feels himself jerk backward, or imagines he does.

His eyes are closed. He sees everything and nothing.

They’re flashes, but they’re too fast for him to register properly.

He sees himself again, locked in the Order Prison, and what he was too drugged up to notice at the time appears in blurry images behind his eyelids. He sees Luke taking off his gloves and his fingers manipulating the metal that had held Michael’s wrists up, so the chains break. He sees Luke’s eyes on him, as Michael opens the hole in the wall. He sees the mesmerizement, and something else. Unmistakable fear. But they’re alive, both of them breathing, jumping out into the unknown, in the air, down but safe, Halsey manipulating the air currents underneath them, smoothing their fall.

He sees Death Valley abandoned, blurry enormous groups of people following someone out. He is that someone. There are people by his sides, but he can’t focus on them, because he’s too focused on the scattered images of himself, like in a stop motion film. There’s something different about him; there’s a scar on the side of his face, a scar that licks down his neck. His ear, it’s… it’s different. His right ear is cut in half. It looks painful, but mostly scarred. Michael doesn’t have any time to pay attention to that, to adjust, because when he tries to seek more of that image, it flickers and changes. He sees the outside, dozens and dozens of cars, people getting into them, with gleeful expressions, throwing their fists in the air in victory. Leading them all, in the first car, is Michael. But he doesn’t get to see who’s beside him at all, because it flickers and changes again.

This time, just darkness.

Another punch in his chest, and then he’s opening his eyes.

In front of him, now there are the two women, Cameron carefully letting go of his arms, but still watching his reactions closely, and Nicole, looking apprehensive and serious. He sees them through a blurred vision; he’s tearing up. 

Michael tries swallowing it down; the emotions and the lump in his throat, the swell in his chest and the rapid breathing. It doesn’t quite work.

“How did you do that?” he spits out the question, staring at her.

In horror or in awe, he isn’t sure.

Cameron shrugs. “You’re a witch. I’m a prophet.”

He narrows his eyes, turns to Nicole, because it can’t be right, but Nicole just takes a deep breath, and shrugs as well. “She’s not a real… that’s not how it works. There can only be one prophet in the world at a time. The Trinity was hunted down and retrieved from another continent hundreds of years ago. What Cameron is, is different. She’s a back-up plan. There’s always another one alive, all the time. If The Trinity dies, she takes her place.”

“And lose all agency, so we’re not hoping for that alternative,” she smirks up at Michael. He feels the burning in his eyes worsen, imagining someone so special and yet, with a fate so cruel, but he doesn’t voice that thought. He has a feeling she can read it in his face anyway. “I will most likely live a normal life and die by old age or war stupidity, though.”

Michael’s bottom lip quivers, but he tries to hide it.

“You… you can see the future, too? You get glimpses of it, at least?”

She shakes her head. “No, it’s nothing like that. I only met The Trintiy once, and while I was there, she looked into my eyes, and I looked into hers. I searched for as much as I could find. There are things I saw, there are things I didn’t. I get to show it to people, but they can never see as clearly as I can. People only see what they want to see.”

Nicole gives her a bitter smile. “We still see the same truth.”

“Only through different lenses,” she says, smiling softly at her friend. 

Michael presses his lips together, looking away from them.

This should feel like enough. He wins. Chaos wins. In the end, no matter what happens and how many lives are lost, Death Valley still becomes a ghost city. He takes them somewhere better, somewhere safer, somewhere they all celebrate going, even if they’re all anonymous faces to Michael. Michael will do good as their prince, and he should find some sort of peace in that, some satisfaction that the future isn’t as scary as it seems right now.

Now, it’s scary plenty, and he can’t shake the feeling that things have been peaceful for too long.

“If it’s not…” his voice cracks, and he clears his throat, getting their attention again. “If it’s not about Benji and Daryl’s mission… then what did you want to talk about?”

His head is foggy, his muscles feel all numb, but still, still there was supposed to be more to this conversation than unsettling revelations. That was just a bonus. It’s Nicole who speaks next, though, gives him a wary look that should mean more than it actually does, he’s sure. It should be reassuring or something, but all it does is remind him that he doesn’t even know half the people he’s supposed to be fighting for. And will. He’ll win for them. Come back in more or less one piece, too.

“It’s about what’s coming,” Nicole says. “Cameron doesn’t know what is, but it’ll be a game changer. It’s probably why Daryl and Benji’s mission doesn’t make a difference in the endgame. Something is going to happen, and you’ll be leaving Death Valley soon--”

Michael interrupts her, blinking a couple of times, startled. “I don’t want to leave.”

“But you will,” Cameron answers calmly, avoiding his eyes. “Your hair will look the same as it does now,” she raises her eyes suddenly, pointing in the general direction of his head. “It won’t be long at all. Not more than a few weeks, maybe even a few days.”

He shakes his head, a silent mantra that keeps quietening: “No, no, no…”

Nicole’s voice comes again, stronger this time. “You’ll leave. And I don’t think you’ll come back before it’s time to fight,” she raises her eyebrows. Michael looks at her, swallowing back his heart. “This conversation is important so you know where we stand. We won’t come to fight by your side, and in fact we’ll probably be fighting your people. But we will be fighting your fight, and answering to you. You need to know that now, because the battlefield isn’t the best place to chitchat.”

If he could pinpoint the exact moment in which his head stops going at a hundred miles per hour to stop completely, he would say it’s now.

One second, thoughts boiling up like a plague, the next no breathing, no thinking, no heartbeat at all. He can’t tell whether his body has decided to play along with his mind, but there’s nothing in his head. It’s too much of a difficult concept to grasp, so he holds his breath and forgets to let go, until his muscles are all tensed and he’s frowning so hard he feels his eyes start watering again.

His eyes are burning, his nostrils are burning; his throat burns too.

“Why would the two you put so much faith in a dumb teenager?” he chuckles lowly.

Nicole gives him an easy smile, tearing up as well. She holds Cameron’s hand over the table, but it’s at Michael that she looks. “Because Cameron has seen you take us out of this hole, and it’s my child that’s holding your hand on the way out.” 

Michael pauses. He’s not sure he wants to know whether it’s Dennis or Tati. He shouldn’t even know this much; doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like it’s good news. 

But he gets it.

He may not have a child, but he knows that selfless sacrifice is what parenting is supposed to look like: Nicole and Cameron both willing to die for the cause he’s not even sure how he’s going to fight for yet, all because they’ve skipped to the end, and found Michael holding one of theirs.

“Joel and Benji, too,” Cameron says. “If Benji’s alive by then, that is,” she adds; Michael can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic or not. Michael blinks a couple of times, looking at her. “Nobody knows about that, Michael. Nobody knows that the four of us will be answering to you. But we are. We’ll help you, no matter what your plan is, and we won’t see each other until the finish line, but when it comes, we’ll be there, just waiting for your command.”

“No pressure at all,” he snorts, laughing weakly.

They don’t laugh back.

Nicole just tilts her head to the side as if in confusion, and Cameron gives him a look of sympathy.

“I need to tell Luke,” Michael adds. 

Looking like she may argue, Nicole opens her mouth, frowning, but Cameron just shakes her head, stopping Nicole from starting. “It’s alright, Nic. Luke would rather die before betraying him. Plus he wasn’t even here when the village was attacked.”

“You can trust him,” he nods, slowly, the memories from their first day in Death Valley too brutal for him to shake, the feeling of Luke sobbing in his arms, the death all around them in the village that was burned to the ground, taking almost all of its people as well. “But,” he turns to Cameron, frowning. “But can’t you… isn’t there a way you could find out who did that? Who told the Order about the human village, that it was close to Death Valley?”

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I never saw the person who betrayed Chaos. The Trinity never showed me that at all. I didn’t know it was going to happen, and we’re still in the dark about who was that did that. They may do it again, and this time Order won’t miss.”

There’s silence, then.

Silence that expands between them, makes Michael’s head feel like it’s so quiet you could almost mistake it for peacefulness. But it’s not. The flags are wavering to show there’s danger coming, and he’d give anything to not about it, to be blissfully ignorant for a little while longer, holding onto this fantasy that things are as they should be: alright.

But still, it makes sense that they’d tell him where they stand.

It should make him feel confident and protected, but it only makes him feel alone again.

He stands up, ready to go outside with the others, but then something occurs to him, and he looks at Cameron with a frown in his face. “Please tell me that the reason you don’t like Halsey is that she hit on Benji or something like that. Please.”

Cameron gives him a pitiful smile. “Do you really want to know?”

No, he doesn’t.

“Yes.”

Nicole looks away, like it’s too painful to watch. Cameron takes a deep breath, but doesn’t break eye-contact. “She attacks you, then leaves you for the dead. And you almost, almost die because of that. But you don’t. You’re stronger than her abandonment, stronger than what happens,” Cameron tries to smile. He knows it’s certainly meant to lessen the blow, but it doesn’t. “But yes, Michael. She turns on you.”

Very slowly, he nods.

And then he goes outside, to pretend like the past twenty minutes never happened.

* * *

Michael’s head is buzzing. He’s not sure how he makes it, smiling and going along with everything people say, eating some type of dessert that Joel’s cooked for them, something warm and sugary that makes Michael’s stomach growl for more, like he hadn’t been used to more, like he hadn’t had at least ten desserts more elaborated and delicious when he still lived in the city.

But he isn’t successful in hiding from everyone. Maybe he fools Tati, Dennis, Harry, and Joel and Benji won’t look his way too intently, but Luke gets it. He gets that something happened, keeps his eyes trained on Michael, and every single time Michael catches him staring, he smiles quietly, as if to say that they’ll be alone soon.

In the comfort of their bedroom, their little bubble, Michael tells him everything. It’s no news to Luke what Cameron is, that she was never a witch to start with, but he still nods slowly to what’s next. Michael leaves out some details, like his ear and the scar, or about Halsey, because he doesn’t see the point in telling Luke. He’d only get worried, and it wouldn’t change the future.

Hell, for all he knows, telling Luke is what causes the future.

He’s not entirely sure how these things work.

They talk in quiet tones sitting on their shared bed, and for what feels like forever, silence engulfs them right after. It’s like the bubble around them tightens. Michael doesn’t know what to do about it. It doesn’t feel claustrophobic, because he’s got Luke, but it still feels strange. 

He looks up at Luke, frowning slightly, and Luke seems to get it. He comes to Michael, crawls on the bed until he’s cupping Michael’s face with his hand, his other hand and knees used to give him support, and presses his lips to Michael’s once, twice, three pecks until Michael’s smiling a bit. Michael holds Luke’s face in his hands, stares at those big blue eyes, feels something in his chest swell. He’d tell Luke he loves him, wouldn’t be the first time, definitely not the last, but words feel like needles; mockery that they thought there’d be peace, at least momentarily, but the future was just moving its engines so tragedy would strike again.

At least he’ll be there to see Chaos thrive.

He never thought it’d be something that would be a consolation prize to war happening, the fact that Order wouldn’t eradicate them, but it still is. How odd.

Luke closes his eyes, touches his nose to Michael’s, his warm hand bringing Michael’s face even closer to him. Michael couldn’t put into words what he feels if he tried. That through all of this, Luke’s his home. Luke’s his home and it scares the hell out of him that it was one of Nicole and Joel’s children by his side and not Luke. It makes him want argue with himself, say that Luke was probably just leading from the other side, helping more people out of Death Valley. It makes him want to cry, too.

Smiling sweetly, Luke kisses his cheeks, each of them before he’s moving to kiss Michael’s mouth once more. Michael doesn’t stop him, but doesn’t let it end there. He holds Luke at a better angle, moves down and takes his boyfriend with him, until Luke’s body is hovering over his as he lies down. He presses his mouth to Luke’s, his body to his, one of his hands on the back of Luke’s head, the other sliding down his back.

Just like the first time they kissed, he tries to press secrets into his mouth.

_I’m scared. I miss Mum. I don’t know what to make of Daryl. I don’t know what to do about war. I hope the person who betrayed Chaos and told the location to Order isn’t anyone I know. I’m so so so afraid, but your lips on mine make it better._

It’s different because this time, he thinks Luke already knows all of that.

* * *

“So what exactly is your plan?” Michael asks, smirking up at Luke.

It’s late at night, and everyone’s gone to bed already. Luke’s holding his hand and guiding him up to the roof. There’s mischief behind Luke’s eyes, but also something more; purer, beautiful. 

Luke looks over his shoulder, to Michael, still holding his hand.

“To make you happy. Of course.”

* * *

The next two days go by in a blur.

They’re weirdly full of socializing, hanging out with Halsey, with Ashton, going to the place South of Death Valley where they’re restoring old houses for the few human families that remained after the destruction. Michael finds himself nodding acknowledging to Caleb in the corridors of the Big House -- and Caleb insists on calling him prince, each and every time --, making small talk with Jason and Diana, snorting at Geordie’s jokes when she smokes sitting on the bench of the only park in the city. Michael even meets her parents, very quickly, when they’re on their way to Nicole’s to help with gun training with the younger ones, which is apparently Nicole’s job: making as many of them, Chaos or human, as sharp and strong as they’ll take her trainings.

He goes to Jack’s twice, once every day, with Luke all the time, but he doesn’t stay for long. He knows Luke and Jack need time alone just like he wishes he had with his siblings. So he always goes back to the Big House when the Hemmings brothers stay together, and sort of just waits for Daryl to leave his office or his bedroom, hopes to see him by chance, but ends up giving up and going back to his room where he sleeps until he’s hungry or someone knocks on his door.

He hasn’t seen Daryl since their fight. Since Michael found out he had a sister and a brother.

It’s early in the afternoon, and Michael had lunch with Luke, Jason, Halsey and Diana downstairs. Jason stayed to wash the dishes, Diana and Halsey left to go find Geordie to do one thing or another, probably related to the restoring of the houses, and then, as Michael and Luke start towards the bedrooms again, Luke stops Michael, giving him a look.

“You need to talk to your Dad,” he says.

Michael shifts his weight to the other foot. He doesn’t correct Luke in calling Daryl his Dad, even though the word would taste bitter in his mouth. Plus, he knows Luke means well; it was Luke who heard him in bed late at night, lying on his chest, as Michael speculated about the life he could’ve had with his siblings, what it felt like when there was a part of him he’d never get to know. Luke had said he couldn’t possibly imagine what it was like, even though Michael could tell that was a lie. He’d lost Ben. Half the time, he was out of Death Valley, which might as well be the same as losing Jack as well.

“I haven’t seen him around,” Michael replies, but he isn’t looking Luke in the eye.

Luke raises his eyebrows. 

“I’ll make myself scarce. Talk to him.”

Michael blocks his path, smirking up at Luke. 

There’s something about it. Michael couldn’t pinpoint what is it exactly; if it’s the domesticity that’s taken over the past few weeks in spite of the war engines cracking to life loudly in all of their lives, or the most recent threats that came in the form of secondhand prophecies. He hasn’t treated Halsey differently at all. He’s still dreaming about his first kills. Sometimes he closes his eyes and he sees Ashton, transformed into a black panther, ripping apart the throat of the man who tortured him for half a year. The worst of all bad guys is the father he’s been dancing around and, God forbid, actually missing, and his only safe place, his mother, has been absent from his life from the second he got arrested to now, months after being broken free from prison. And yet, through all of this, his world turning upside down and everything inside of him changing to suit the things around him as well, there’s Luke smirking back at him, eyebrows still raised in a defying way, pushing him to do the right thing even when his ego holds him back.

“I love you,” Michael frowns.

Luke’s smirk grows into a proper smile, and Luke wraps his arms around Michael’s waist, bringing him closer. Michael’s hands spread on his chest, but he doesn’t break eye-contact. Luke doesn’t, either.

“Think a couple I love yous will make me stay?”

“I know they won’t,” Michael says, chuckling lowly. “You’ll disappear in Jack’s lab and lock the door, talk to your brother about developing some sort of device that can tell when I talk to Daryl, and you’ll only come back to me after I talk to him.”

Luke laughs, his eyes closing with how big his smile is, the piercing around his lip looking welcoming. Michael tries to steal a kiss just there, but Luke’s moving as he laughs, and Michael ends up landing his kiss on Luke’s jawline. He settles for that, humming contently, pressing his face to Luke’s neck, shoulder, nesting himself in Luke’s arms.

Rubbing the small of his back in the corridor of the Big House, Luke tells him in a secretive tone: “You’re a kitten.”

“Shut up,” Michael replies, but his heart’s not in it, smiling against Luke, closing his eyes.

Luke breaks the hug, putting some distance between them. One hand sliding to Michael’s waist, the other goes to his face, making Michael look him in the eye. “I love you too,” he says, smiling, and then, seriousness spreading over his face cautiously. “But you need to talk to Daryl. You know that, right? Even if you come back angrier at him than you were before. You need this.”

Michael nods slowly.

Pressing his lips against Luke’s just once, he takes a deep breath, and goes for the stairs.

He looks over his shoulder just once, when he’s already at the top of the stairs. Just to check if Luke’s still there. He is. Michael gives him one brief smile, before moving on -- reassured, somehow validated. 

Shit, he’s so damn in love with the boy.

First he goes to Daryl’s office. 

The thing that makes him hesitate isn’t fear, but nervousness. It doesn’t escape him the irony, how at first he was scared of the man and what he stood for, and now he’s fidgety staring at the big doubled doors, taking several deep breaths and telling himself it’s not too late to knock, to find an apology in him for their last conversation, to want more of what could’ve been.

He knocks, but no response. Though it could not be such a bright idea, he even tries to force the door open, but it’s locked. Michael isn’t giving up so easily though, not after Luke kissing some courage into him. He walks to his father’s bedroom, and knocks on the door.

Once he hears movement inside, he takes a step back, holding his breath.

It takes another moment, but Daryl opens the door.

The first thing Michael notices is that Daryl looks tired, like he hasn’t slept in a long time. The second is that, behind him, the bed is made, like he in fact hasn’t lied on it in a while. His eyes shift back to Daryl, and he blurts out: “If it’s a bad time, I can come later.”

Daryl shakes his head negatively, and opens the door wide for Michael to come in if he wants to. 

He does. He wants to.

Michael presses his lips together, looking at Daryl. He’s frowning, staring intently at the floor, still holding the doorknob, his knuckles turning white. It scares Michael how much of himself he sees in the man, but still he walks in the room, and it doesn’t startle him when he hears the door close with a soft click.

Daryl walks to his bed, and sits in front. He points at a desk with a chair in front for Michael to sit. There’s a book open on the desk, and as Michael takes a seat in front of it, he points at the book with a crooked smile, and with his voice sounding awkward even to his ears, he asks: “What have you been reading? Not Sun Tzu, I hope?”

Daryl doesn’t get the joke.

He shakes his head. “It’s a history book from the city. Schoolbook, really. Nothing special,” he shrugs. Michael glances down at the book once more, and it’s true. He hated those when he had to read them for school, and he thinks it’s funny that his father reads them by choice. But that’s not what he says, because Daryl’s clearing his throat, so Michael turns away from the book, and looks at him. “I shouldn’t have blamed Karen. She did what she thought was right. It wasn’t fair to talk about your mother like that. It’s no use pointing fingers anyway. I’m sorry about that.”

Michael presses his lips together, nodding slowly.

“I’m… thanks for saying that,” he says, since his teenage heart can’t agree with the irrelevancy of pointing fingers. He brings his legs up, sitting cross-legged on the chair, and averts his eyes from Daryl’s. “I’m sorry too. About… the way I left.” He raises his eyes to Daryl, to see if they’re on the same page. The corner of Daryl’s mouth goes up, so he goes on. “It was a lot of information to take in. And I understand if it’s difficult for you to talk about it. But when you’re ready, I do want to know about all the tragedy that I missed out on. I want to know about them. About my siblings.”

Daryl smiles quietly at him.

“When I’m ready,” he repeats. Michael nods. He chuckles, looking away. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. What do you want to know, Michael?”

So he pauses, frowning a bit, lips parted as he stares at his tired father.

What he wants to know is too much to put into words. Michael wants to know about all the life that he could’ve had in Death Valley if Karen hadn’t chosen to keep him shielded from that in the city with all of Order around him. He wants to know if that choice was entirely hers. He wants to know how come Karen and Daryl had a child together, and what happened before and after that. He wants to know who was the mother of his siblings, and what they were like. He wants to know what the fuck Daryl’s thinking, preparing this suicide mission set to leave the second Annika and Nathan come back, to prepare the ground for them and the other Champions when they leave right after him. Michael wants to know what it’ll take for Daryl to give up on that and stay. 

What does he want to know?

Everything. He wants to know everything.


	27. right now they're building a coffin your size

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here u go, a miracle of christmas: another chapter!! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )つ──☆ MERRY CHRISTMAS. ❤

“Start at the beginning,” Michael says quietly, far from an order, even far from a request. The please goes unspoken, but still there, still implied. He raises his eyes to Daryl’s, and watches as his father presses his lips together, as if trying to decide what’s the beginning. “My siblings. They’d be older than me, wouldn’t they?” he frowns. 

Daryl shakes his head, then stops himself, apprehensive. 

“The girl yes. The boy no. It’s complicated.” 

Michael shifts uncomfortably on the chair, looking at Daryl like he hopes he’ll have to do less talking than he already is. He wants to laugh and tell Daryl to uncomplicate the complicated, then. What he does instead is nodding carefully, saying: “Well, so she was born before me, you met Mum, and then after a while you went back to my sister’s mother and you two had a boy who didn’t make it?”

Daryl shakes his head again.

Complicated. Michael bets.

He licks his lips, looking at Daryl, expecting something, but it doesn’t come for what feels like forever. His heart is making its way up his throat once more, and all he can think of is that this is one of the most difficult conversations he’s ever had, and he wishes Karen was there with him. Not Luke, although he would help, too. But Karen. It’s just that these feelings, looking with big eyes to the father he knows now he has, takes him back to feeling like a child. Children need their guardians. In Michael’s case, he always needed Karen -- and now there’s Daryl, and this thing between them that Michael doesn’t know what to call yet, but to call it parenting would feel like too much. All he knows is he needs her, he misses her, and talking about her will be--

“Cameron isn’t much younger than me, you see,” Daryl starts, raising his eyebrows. 

Michael blinks a couple of times, shocked. “Is Cameron… Benji’s Cameron? She was the mother to my siblings?” he frowns.

“What?!” Daryl snorts. A hint of laugh in his voice, he shakes his head, holding back a smile. “No, Jesus Christ, Michael. No. Still plenty of years between us. No, that’s not… Perhaps that’s not how I should’ve started it. I can see why you were confused.”

He meets Michael’s eyes with sympathy. Michael snorts too.

“You think?” he half-asks, half-snorts.

It’s a snorting festival, Daryl doing it again as he shrugs with an apologetic smile. If anything, it gets the smile to stay, even if it sneaks away slowly as he begins to talk again. “I was a teenager, younger than you, when she found her way to the village where I lived with my parents. I think I must’ve been fourteen or fifteen. She wasn’t older than nine. Tough kid, walked in our small village with her face splashed with blood, her clothes all ragged… Mum thought she’d been attacked. Turns out she was the one doing the attacking,” he smirks up at Michael. Michael presses his lips together, but says nothing. “That was before Death Valley. That was way before the Magick War, too, so you need context. It wasn’t illegal to be Chaos, but we were all scattered and disorganized. It was a mess. I grew up in a village with less than two hundred people, and I only knew four or five families that were Chaos. All the rest was overwhelmingly Order. They had all the good jobs, all the good food, all the good everything.”

Michael knows. He remembers, heritage of war just kicking in, the rightfulness that got to him, thinking he was owed the world just for being Order. Even though he was only half.

“You were talking about Cameron,” he reminds Daryl.

Daryl nods. “Yes. So she found us. She ran away from the city, killed her guards with a pocket knife this big,” he raises one hand, spreading his thumb and index fingers apart. Michael looks away, uncomfortable with the thought. “You know why Order wanted her?”

“Because she’s a prophet,” he says, “or a prophet to-be, at least. I know she’s not a witch.”

“Or human, which was what she passed as when she came back to the city years later. But that’s right. They wanted to keep her, in case anything happened to The Trinity. They keep The Trinity locked up in a cell, in the very prison you were held prisoner too. But Cameron was never there the way you or even The Trinity were. She was nine, ripped from her family, and brought to a room with The Trinity to confirm the whispers on the streets, that she could be the next one.”

“Then she had a bunch of revelations from The Trinity, and Order found out they had their girl. She was resourceful, found a way to break free, somehow ended up in your village,” Michael gestures in conclusion, to end that chapter. But Daryl only gives him a pressed smile. It’s the type of smile that only people sentenced to a harsh fate give other people. Michael was in the giving end of that smile enough times to recognize it. It clicks for him, and he raises his eyebrows, voice dropping a few tones, quiet and careful: “You… was she there for you? Because of me?”

“I don’t remember if I was fourteen or fifteen, but I remember I was way too young to be thinking of who would my children be,” Daryl rolls his eyes, but the ghost of smile is still there. Michael licks his lips again, and Daryl pulls his legs up to the bed as well, sitting cross-legged like he’s mirroring Michael, only he doesn’t seem to realize it. “You have to understand my skepticism. This bloody child walks into our village in the middle of the night, everyone comes to see, she points her nails full of dirt at my face, and starts babbling about how I’ll be the king of Chaos, and my son will be the savior of my people,” he shakes his head, looking away from Michael. “Truly cheesy, if you ask me. Tacky, even. I’m not big on prophecies or very dramatic entrances.”

Michael takes a deep breath.

It’s hard not to feel guilt, although that was over two decades before he was born, for sure. It’s hard not to picture Daryl as a teenager, younger than he is now, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, a couple of years before war starts. What is hard is to think of smiling sweet Cameron killing guards with a pocket knife. How desperate she must’ve been to tell the world what she saw, to find Daryl, tell the people responsible for the fate of their world that they needed to prepare. It’s hard to link that child to the woman he met. It’s hard to link Daryl, the man standing before him now, to the scared teenager he must’ve been.

It makes Michael feel brokenhearted, but instead of saying so, he just looks away.

What he says is: “So what? Did you just start having children so you’d have your prince?”

Daryl chuckles lowly. “We weren’t that desperate. Plus I didn’t believe in her. Not many people knew about prophets, and the people who did know, would rather we didn’t believe in the prophecies anyway. It was easier to take Cameron for a human who, in the middle of the trauma of having lost her family, just dreamed the whole thing up, and--”

Michael interrupts his train of thought, raising his voice over Daryl’s. “Why would she have lost her family, if she was human? There was no war yet.”

“There was no war, but the brutality was always present,” Daryl answers, rhetorically so. “To whoever gets to step on the weaker, they’ll do it. It’s basic rules of survival. You cannot be the oppressed and the oppressor at the same time, can you? If you’re oppressing, you cannot be oppressed.”

“Not necessarily,” Michael shakes his head, but doesn’t look away. “I mean, I get that this was how you all thought at the time, but it clearly wasn’t working, if it was plausible for Cameron’s family to be slaughtered just because they were supposedly human. You can’t be the oppressor and the savior at the same time, either. You have got to pick a side. It’s a daily choice.”

Daryl cocks an eyebrow. “I don’t want to oppress Order, Michael. I simply want a space for Chaos in society as well.”

“And for humans,” Michael reminds him, but Daryl only rolls his eyes, and tries to speak again. Michael doesn’t let him. “But you were telling me about my siblings. You were telling me about not believing Cameron when you two first met.”

They lock eyes for a second, and Daryl sighs softly, like he’s deciding to let it go for now.

“Yes. I didn’t. It took me a few years, and meeting Scarlet’s mother for that,” he presses his lips together for a moment. Michael’s about to ask him whether he regrets that, meeting his sister’s mother, when he resumes talking. “I don’t… I don’t know how to put it. You’d have to meet her to know what I mean. Ursula had tunnel vision for everything. She obsessed easily. It was like that about learning to read when nobody in the village could, then with shooting a gun, when all we had were knives. I grew up with her, but it wasn’t until she met Cameron, as a child, that I really saw her become obsessed. All she ever wanted was Chaos to have a worthy leader, someone that would bring us out of the shadows that weren’t even so marked yet at the time. I don’t think Ursula ever really cared for me,” he shrugs, with a small sad smile on his lips.

Michael shifts on his chair, and the old wooden material creaks a little under his weight.

“I’m sorry you felt used.”

He means it, too, but Daryl only gives him a funny look.

“Oh, but I didn’t feel used. The prettiest girl in the village wanted to marry me,” he snorts, like it’s a no-brainer. Michael doesn’t know how much of it is a joke, but he laughs anyway. Daryl smiles. “I was around twenty, then. Ursula was a true believer in everything Cameron had said, but I mostly didn’t pay her any attention. The war had started. There were no safe places. Thinking about prophecies was a luxury for the ones who weren’t involved.”

“And you were,” Michael adds.

Daryl nods. “And I was. Not only me, mind you, but I was one of the youngest, as was Ursula. My parents were leading our group from the North, but it isn’t like the schoolbooks make it sound like. We don’t come from a family of tyrants. Mum was a blacksmith. Dad baked. We knew how to fight because we were Chaos, and they were some of the only adults who were respected enough to lead the small group that marched to the capital. They killed many, but they were no killers.”

Michael averts his eyes from his father, asking quietly: “Did they die in war?”

“No, and that’s what’s ironic, I think,” Daryl says, slowly, like he’s bringing back the memory with his own hands. “Mum died in a car accident, bringing food to Death Valley long after it was established, and Dad, who was struggling with cancer at the time, couldn’t resist much longer without her. It’s been, what? Like four years, maybe five. They’d have liked you.”

Grandparents. That would have been… Michael takes a deep breath.

“Maybe I’d have liked them back.”

Daryl gives him an approving look, small but honest, and it makes Michael feel like crying, so he looks away. “So what I’m saying is,” Daryl clears his throat, raising his voice a bit. “Ursula and I were together through war. I started Death Valley, brought all of Chaos that I could find, and she got pregnant in our first year here. She thought she was expecting the boy that would save the people we were shielding against the rest of the world. Turns out, it was… Scarlet.”

The name in his voice sounds different. 

Maybe like a curse, maybe like a blessing. Maybe fifty-fifty. 

“I was older then, and so was Cameron. She was training to be a fighter, to help, and I still didn’t take her seriously. Ursula, though, she did. She went to Cameron, and Cameron said The Trinity never showed her Scarlet at all. That was enough for Ursula to lose interest in the child and me, so from an early age, she was very… Scarlet was very close to me when she was young,” Daryl gives him a pressed smile, nervous, like it hurts to think about it, but it hurts more to try to forget. Michael wonders how that could be. “As a baby, she only cried night and day. And I couldn’t be around anymore, because there were Chaos people, not warriors but just _people_ locked in the Order Prisons. I had to find a way to get them to Death Valley. So I went,” he pauses, raises both of his eyebrows. “I believe your books call it what I did a terrorist attack. I agree that many people died by my hands that day, but none of them were civilians. They were all military.”

Tilting his head to the side, Michael shrugs. “Not my books. Didn’t write them.”

Daryl snorts once more, shaking his head, but goes back to the story. “I met Karen there, Michael. That day, in the city, and it wasn’t before I blew the old building up. It was after. She saw it happening. She knew exactly what type of man I was.”

Michael feels something uncomfortable licking at his ankles, his torso, his neck. At first, he thinks it’s his magick, irrationally wanting in on the conversation, but then he realizes it isn’t that at all. It’s just misplaced shame.

“She wasn’t,” he stops, frowning, “she didn’t live in the city before me. She lived in a village, far away from the city. I grew up there. She used to live there as well, before. With John.” 

“Ah, but Karen was very fond of traveling,” Daryl cocks an eyebrow, and this time, there’s no mistaking it, the bitterness in his voice thick. “She was trying to find a way to go to college in the city. I don’t know who were her contacts, only that it was what she was there for. We ended up meeting, though, and one thing led to another. But I never lied to her. She knew about who I was, about what had been my parents’ legacy. She may not have known about the stupid prophecy, but she did know everything else.”

Michael stares at his feet. “About Scarlet?”

“Yes. About Scarlet, too,” Daryl says.

Reluctantly, Michael looks at his father again. “Were you two ever in love?”

He knows it’s a silly question. He imagines what things must’ve been like then, the war making people die by the hands of soldiers on either side or by famine. Love was probably not a high priority then, not for his parents, not for anyone else. But if only Daryl says yes, then somehow he’ll find a way to comprehend all of this. Not that he dreams of a reality in which Karen and Daryl are together -- the made-up scenario in his head seems like some sort of sick practical joke. It’s just that if they ever cared for each other just because, then maybe Michael’s safe in assuming someone took care of them, someone made them feel safe, someone made them feel love. And if he was born out of that feeling, maybe things aren’t as painful or as complicated. 

But things are complicated, Daryl had said.

Daryl gives him a face, lifts his shoulders.

“You’d have to ask her for her side of the story to know, I guess.”

Which tells Michael enough.

He takes a deep breath, runs his hands over his head, messing the undercut, but he doen’t care about it. He even stumbles over his eyebrow piercing on the way, and it stings a bit, but again, he doesn’t worry. Not about that. 

“What happened then?”

“We were together for a couple of months. I was excited about her pregnancy, even though I knew she had a husband who she lied to, saying the baby was his. There was something thrilling about only meeting in the city, somewhere in the middle between her and my places. Scarlet was a toddler at the time. I told her she’d have a little brother or sister. She did seem excited about it.”

Michael holds his breath, looking at his father.

“Then… then Karen disappeared. I thought she was dead at first, was hungry for revenge even though I didn’t know who to direct that to. I found out later it wasn’t that. She’d just heard about the prophecy. Someone told her. Probably that girl who used to follow her around and became a Council member not long after, I think Nijak was her name?” Michael nods. Yes. Nijak. “I should’ve tracked Nijak. But she disappeared too. I didn’t hear from Karen for years, until suddenly she became a Council member herself.”

He puts his feet down, needing the feeling of the wooden floor under his feet to ground himself on that. “Why didn’t you come for me, then? If Mum came out of her hiding spot? We were in the city for years. I spent half my life there.”

“I tried,” he raises his eyebrows, looking away, defeat making his shoulders curl, like he’s ready to nest himself between them. “To no success. Obviously.” Michael narrows his eyes, that vague answer not doing it for him, but then Daryl looks at him again, and says, with an apologetic smile: “I got ahead of myself in the story, didn’t I? Skipped basically from when you were born to now. A lot of happened during that time.”

Michael presses his lips together, then sighs heavily. “I know Scarlet tried to kill Halsey. I know she almost burned down the whole house in the process.” 

“Preteens,” Daryl starts, frowning, “some are more rebellious than others.” Michael gives him a hard look, and Daryl smiles, again, apologetically. “I wouldn’t hold it against her, Michael. That was after she killed her brother. I’d hardly call her capable of discerning right from wrong anyway.”

It’s too abrupt for Michael to think his reaction before he does it. He takes one of his hands to his mouth, covering it, as he holds his breath. It’s like a stab in the heart, only it’s worse, because it’s family. Because it’s what family was supposed to be like, or something. Just because it hurts.

He knows what Daryl is doing, or hoping to do anyway. He’s trying to make it seem like less, like maybe because it was so long ago it doesn’t matter. But Michael -- and this is the scary part -- knows Daryl better than that. Daryl’s staring at him with an eyebrow cocked, as if he’s daring his son to grieve, dare his son to feel pain, any more than he might have felt. 

Scarlet killed her brother. Scarlet killed _their_ brother. 

Michael thinks he should have a say in it, but he didn’t know any of them existed.

He closes his eyes, taking a deep breath, and removing his hand from over his mouth, trying to behave, trying to take the most he can from this conversation, trying to just… pull himself together after what Daryl’s told him. Daryl just waits. Looking at him patiently, looking tired but more awake, he rubs his knees as if he’s cold, and waits until Michael looks at him again.

“What was his name?” he asks.

Daryl shakes his head. “He didn’t… in Chaos, baptism is after a month. You’re supposed to feel the name from the baby, almost like the child could tell you. Scarlet killed the boy before that,” he averts his eyes from Michael, and Michael feels another stab, but holds still. “She was jealous, I think. Ursula never spent any time with her, so I’d have to take care of the baby as well, and she would have to share her time with me with her brother. I think that’s why she did. Truth is, I never really asked.”

Michael tears up; can’t help it, staring down at his legs.

“Were you too stunned to?” he asks. Daryl just nods, but his heart’s not in it. Michael snorts, nodding slowly, then adds: “What did you do to her when she did that? Did you kill her?”

He feels the intensity of Daryl’s eyes on him then, like if he was the one suffering from the sting of words until then, not he’s passed that on to Daryl. The way he stares at Michael in those milliseconds it takes him to answer are already plenty of answer. 

He shakes his head slowly. “I would never do that to one of my children, Michael. No matter what they do.” He’s tearing up, too. Daryl, the King of Chaos, the murderer, the Order serial killer. He’s tearing up, looking about to break, that his son would even think such thing. Michael doesn’t feel guilty about it; he doesn’t know Daryl _that_ well. But he wishes he did, because it’s still not a pretty sight to see, watching his father’s heart break. “I didn’t do anything, nobody did,” he looks away from Michael once more. “We buried the little coffin. We moved on. Ursula found herself a spy job in the city with the help of an eye drug that makes her eyes roll back in white, and I took care of Scarlet for a while. Then came Halsey, and things got more complicated.”

“The drug Jack does, that’s for Ursula?” he frowns, looking at Daryl in a way that demands to be looked back. “Still for Ursula?” 

Daryl doesn’t answer that. 

“You already know what happened to Halsey. I took her out of the room in time, but I think Scarlet… I don’t think she forgave me for that, you know?” he raises his eyebrows, eyes still on the duvet over the bed, what he can see it of it. “I think she expected me to let Halsey burn. I think she considered that a personal attack, that I didn’t. She thought I was picking sides. I was just trying to keep them both safe.”

Slowly, the words from Jason fall back into place. _Jack is the biggest threat to Death Valley since Scarlet left. Crazy chick tried to burn down the Big House once._

“She left, then,” Michael helps, but doesn’t have it in him to look Daryl in the eye. “She couldn’t take it and left. Then what happened? Order got to her?”

Daryl nods, then stops. “She did leave. But it wasn’t Order that got to her. It was Ursula,” he pauses, as if the next parts are the most difficult for him, as if these are the ones that make him more uncomfortable. Michael watches closely, this time unable to look away. “She didn’t want to be in Death Valley anymore. Said she’d look for her mother. I told her I could help, if that was the case, but she didn’t want my help. She left, somehow managed to find Ursula, and next thing I know, my baby girl is set on being a spy, on fighting in this war, too. I couldn’t stop her. Nobody could, no matter what. She’s too fierce to be convinced to do something different than what she wants,” he pauses, meeting Michael’s eyes. Michael notices the present tense, but doesn’t point it out. He’s holding his breath. “I still had a lot of supplies from the old days, a lot of eye drugs that hadn’t been used up to this point by anyone really. No spies were in high enough positions that they actually needed them. But now I did. Not only for Ursula who, in spite of not caring for me, I still consider an old friend. But for my daughter. It’s important than Jack keeps making the drug, because otherwise Order will find out they’ve been spied on by my daughter the last ten years or so, and they’ll kill her on spot.”

Michael takes a deep breath, feeling his shoulders tense, his heart in his throat.

“You didn’t,” he stops. His voice cracks. He closes his eyes, takes another deep breath. “You didn’t tell me Scarlet was still alive. You let me think she was dead. Halsey thinks she’s dead, too. Everyone thinks she’s dead. Why did you… Why did you kill her in everyone’s lives?”

Daryl gives him a sad, sad half-smile. 

“Because everyone feels safer thinking she’s dead.”

Michael frowns, looking away. The tears are collecting in his eyes, and it’s too much. He sniffs, and rubs the backs of his hands against his eyes, trying to get rid of the proof that it gets to him, all of this. Daryl doesn’t seem to hold it against him, looking away as Michael composes himself.

“I want to meet her,” he says, finally. “I need to.”

Daryl shakes his head slowly, still looking side. “You won’t. Nathan called earlier today. The transmission wasn’t clear again, there was something with Annika… I don’t know. But they’re arriving in two days. Once he arrives, I’m going. Me and some other people you don’t know. Scarlet will let us in, she’s resourceful… and then, we’ll do something for you. We’ll bring their defense down.”

Michael snorts loudly, outraged. 

“You’re-- in two days?! You’re getting yourself and my sister killed in two days?!”

Daryl blinks a couple of times, apparently surprised, like the thought that Michael would care hadn’t crossed his mind. “You don’t understand. This is all part of the plan. We’ll start what the Champions will finish days later. And when it’s all done, you can be the prince you were born to be. You’ll save all these people, Michael,” he smiles, his tears turning fast from pain to pride. “You’ll be the one to break them free. You’ll be the one to save Chaos.”

It’s infuriating, Michael sees, how easily people will twist the truth so they’ll believe the version that suits them more. He shakes his head, holding it all back in for another second, before he’s breathing hard and staring at his father, body moving closer to him as if drawn by a magnet, the chair under him creaking with the sudden movement.

“You weren’t there for me the past seventeen years of my life. You do this now, you go on this fucking suicide mission, and you won’t be there for any time at all. How’s that for parenting?”

His voice is dying, too; a natural process once the tears start burning his eyes with how he won’t blink, trying not to let them fall. It’s futile, only trying to delay the inevitable, but he’ll fight for as long as his eyes can take it, as his body lets him.

Daryl seems taken aback, more surprised by the second.

He adjusts on his place as well, as drawn to Michael as he is to Daryl.

“You… you care? You care if I die?” 

His voice fails. He’s not crying, just shocked.

Michael shuts his eyes, turning his head away. It could easily be a game, see who fights their feelings for the longest, but Michael hasn’t had as much practice as Daryl’s had, he doesn’t think. It makes his whole body ache to fight back the tears, but he keeps on doing it, struggling but brave, all on the intent of not letting his father see him cry. Because his father’s an idiot. Because a cause should never be worth anyone’s lives. Because there are other ways. 

Because Daryl needs to stop. 

Because Daryl’s the adult here, and Scarlet’s still alive, and maybe Michael can have a shot at having a real family. A broken one, with a murderer sister and a dead little brother, but a family he’ll take anyway. 

Michael takes a deep breath, still not looking at Daryl in the eye, parts his lips to talk, but Daryl goes first, sounding both confused and a little hurt. “I don’t understand. This is for you, Michael. This is so you can… so things are simpler for you. You didn’t grow up in Chaos. You may not see it through the hateful lenses that Karen does,” he snorts, clearly still bitter, but goes on, “but it’s still not your fight. You don’t have to fight this. We should.”

“You don’t get it, do you,” Michael murmurs, bringing his hand to his face, wiping away the tears that, stubbornly, run down his cheeks. His face is still turned away from Daryl, but he can hear the soft sounds of the mattress as Daryl tries to move closer, unsure and puzzled. “It’s not about… If it’s for me, then I’m saying I don’t want this. Don’t do this.”

There’s a second of silence that passes between them.

Daryl doesn’t seem to know the words for what happens next, and neither does Michael.

Michael sighs heavily, turns to him. Daryl isn’t crying, his face isn’t as red and wet as Michael feels his, but he looks like he’s lost, like the ground underneath him has disappeared. Michael knows the feeling, the infinite falling, the boneless dread of having been wrong. But even through all of that, there’s still hardness -- not a single indication to show Michael that Daryl’s changed his mind about going to the city. 

He looks away from Daryl again.

“What’s your plan, anyway?” 

Daryl’s voice is quiet, but firm. “Scarlet can have us all in town, in no time. I have a… my magick,” he pauses, and Michael looks at him again. Daryl raises his hand, and blinks. Fast, like it’s no effort at all, his eyes roll back in petrol black. From the center of his palm a purple substance, something between gas and liquid, swirls around itself. Michael frowns, staring from it to his father, and Daryl closes his palm, blinking his eyes back to dark green again. “It’s poison. My magick is poison. I can kill dozens at a time, if somebody else distracts them.”

He holds his breath for a second, then releases with a sigh.

“You’re all going to go in blindingly and kill as many as you can, so when the Champions can get to the city, they’ll finish the job, and then what? I walk over the corpses of both Chaos and Order with the people that lives here?”

Daryl studies him for a moment.

“You don’t think it’s scary and ugly?” he raises his eyebrows, again in what seems like a challenge. Michael stares at him blankly, annoyed at Daryl not answering his question, and Daryl adds: “My magick.”

Michael shrugs. 

“People don’t choose their magick,” he says.

Daryl gives him a grim smile, looking away. “No, that’s not what we’re there to do. We’re there to kill, so to an extent you’re right. Just not randomly. There’s a… I made a deal with some Order witches, Michael,” he pauses, glancing Michael’s way again. Michael’s frowning, tears drying on his cheeks, eyes and nostrils still burning but the pain giving way to worry. “I know it may be hard for you to believe now, but this is the most peaceful solution I could find.”

“You’re their assassin,” Michael tells him, “you’re getting mixed with Order politics,” and because Daryl doesn’t stop him, doesn’t tell him he’s wrong, doesn’t say a single thing, he snorts, stands up from his chair, raises his voice. “I can’t fucking believe you! You tell me to not fight because it’s not my fight, but you’ll die for theirs!”

Daryl shakes his head, pressing his lips together for a second. “It’s not like that. I’m doing this for Chaos people. I’m doing this for you.”

Standing up between the desk and the bed, Michael glares at him.

“Don’t. Don’t put this on me. You’re doing what you think is right, but it isn’t. You’re getting mixed with Council members, aren’t you? Some wanting to end others? Mum always told me about the adversities, how it was--” he stops, frozen, stares at Daryl. His heart beating suddenly fast, so fast it can echo in the whole room. He sets his jaw, tries to swallow the lump in his throat. “Mum. You’re not going to…”

“I would never hurt your mother,” Daryl tells him, looking him in the eye. “She’s not our target. No one’s even heard from her since you got arrested, Michael. I checked. She’s probably hiding, afraid she’ll get arrested for being the mother of a half-Chaos child. She’s not in the Council. And even if she was… for all the favors in the world. I wouldn’t hurt her. Trust me.”

Trust him?

Michael doesn’t know if he can.

Even though this has been about trusting Daryl all along, it’s still hard.

Michael turns around, breathing out hard. He runs his hands over his head, then shakes it with his eyes closed, trying to make himself think. When it comes down to it, he believes Daryl. He doesn’t know whether he trusts him fully, because that’s just different, but he does believe that Daryl wouldn’t hurt Karen, that she’s got nothing to do with it. But it still makes him want to shake some sense into Daryl that he’s getting mixed with Order politics.

All for Chaos. All for him.

He looks at Daryl again, sitting on the bed, and Michael wants to cry again.

He sits down next to Daryl, seeks his cold hands even though it’s weird to hold them, they’re bigger than Michael’s, and it’s awkward, Daryl staring at their hands together like he doesn’t know what to do about it. But Michael doesn’t let go of them, holds his father’s hands in his with his heart on his sleeve.

“Please, please don’t go. You’ll die.”

Daryl gives him the tiniest bit of smiles, and looks at him. Michael thinks Daryl may cry, too.

“Tell me you won’t,” Micheal asks, in a whisper, squeezing Daryl’s hands.

Daryl doesn’t squeeze back. “I won’t lie to you.”

Michael lets go of his hands.

He doesn’t think there’s anything else he can say or do.

Standing up, he heads for the door. 

He can feel Daryl’s eyes burning the back of his neck, and Michael’s not sure they’re asking him to stay, but he won’t. He can’t. He needs to shower, to get rid of this dreading feeling, or maybe to go to Cameron and yell at her for having started this. Maybe that’s how prophecies work -- maybe it isn’t that they’re about the unavoidable truth, the future. Maybe they’re just curses that prophets put on people, and they feel in charge of making happen so there’s something to believe in.

Michael stops in front of the door, closing his eyes for a second. Without looking back, he says: “You said you tried to come for me, to see me… Why did you stop?”

There’s a brief uncomfortable pause before he hears:

“Karen… she said she’d find my people and bomb my city if I so much as I tried to take you from her. I love you. I do. But I couldn’t risk losing hundreds of lives. Plus, I knew Cameron was speaking the truth. I knew that, with Luke, you’d find your way to me anyway. You did.”

Michael balls his hands into fists.

And leaves the room.


	28. do you ever think about death? (it's alright if you do, it's fine)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (title adapted from the wonderful _glory and gore_ by lorde. expect lots of titles from that beautiful song!)

“People shouldn’t ask questions they don’t want to hear the answers to,” Michael says, slowly, and pauses. It takes him a moment, and then he’s frowning a bit, looking away. “It’s rhetoric, and doesn’t do anyone any favors.” 

Tati raises her eyes to his, and pokes him on his knee so his attentions are back on her. “I don’t know what rhetoric means,” she informs him.

Luke takes a deep breath. “It’s okay, Tati. Apparently neither does Michael.”

They’re on the park, and it’s getting dark. 

Michael doesn’t know why it was so important for him to get out of the house, but then again, that’s just what he told Luke, after he told Luke everything. That’s a lie, even if it’s one he tells himself as well. He just needed to be away from Daryl, who’s going to die before they have a chance of being father and son, and away from Halsey, who’s going to betray him before they have a chance of making their friendship mean something bigger, and away from everyone else who’s willing to die for him or for Daryl or for Chaos or whatever. 

He’s sitting on one of the swings, Tati on the other by his side. The second they got there, their hands brushing but not properly touching, Michael’s head too numb, his skin crawling with the claustrophobic thought of being stuck inside his head, they noticed Tati, another child, and a man. Luke greeted the man, someone named Jeremiah who Luke whispers to him later was best friends with Tony, _Benji’s Tony_ , _mind control Tony_ , and fought alongside them as a Champion years ago. The little boy about Tati’s age and playing with her was his son, but they didn’t stay for long after Michael and Luke got there.

Jeremiah kept giving Michael a funny look, like he expected Michael to say something big, but all Michael wanted to do was sleep, or maybe run, or maybe something. He never learned what was it for him; he remembers Calum leaving in the middle of the night for a run, sometimes practicing football in his backyard, kicking the ball against the wall so hard that when Michael was sleeping over he’d hear. For Maddy, she needed silence. She’d glare at Michael and Calum for speaking too loudly and not giving her space, then lower her head and start doodling anywhere she could find. Sometimes it was notebooks, sometimes even the boys’ arms if they let her. For Karen, it was alcohol, drunk late at night when she was sure nobody would be there to judge her -- and there was no one. To judge her, that is. Michael didn’t. In a way, he just envied all of them, because they knew what to do when it was just too much.

Eventually Jeremiah and his child left, and it was just the three of them.

“I know what rhetoric means,” Michael mumbles, but his heart’s not in it. He’s staring down again, swinging a bit even with his feet touching the ground.

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Luke says, standing in front of him, hands in his pockets, eyes on his boyfriend. “You needed to know that. All of that. It’s important for you.”

Michael takes a deep breath, looking him in the eye. “It was pointless. Knowing doesn’t change anything. He’s still going. And she’s still going to die before I get a chance to meet her.”

Luke doesn’t say it, but he can hear it even in Luke’s voice: _Maybe that’s a good thing._ And shit, he knows, he’s well-aware that he should be afraid of her. Scarlet killed their baby brother. But that was such a long time ago. Maybe time changed her, maybe it didn’t. Michael would like to find out by himself. And even if it hadn’t, still he needs this chance to sit across from her and just hear her speak; he needs to know what his sister looks like and what her voice sounds like, and if being a couple of months older than Michael makes her wiser or if she wouldn’t bother pretending to have all the answers.

Michael needs to know what’s her favorite color, and if she wishes she had a different magick, and if she forgives her mother for not being there for her as a child, because Michael thinks he’s starting to forgive Daryl, and it’s a scary place to be, in this forgiving process with someone with an expired date.

Tati gives them both a look.

“This sounds like grown-up talk,” she says.

Michael turns to her with a small smile, and she smirks at him, blinking vertically.

Luke sits on the ground, in front of them.

“Mike’s just upset with some family stuff. You get that, don’t you?”

Truth be told, Michael thinks Luke should get a memo when he’s feeling like this. It’s just that he’s all over the place, but then Luke uses that tone of voice to talk to Tati, all serious and understanding, and it makes Michael feel so warm, biting back smiles and holding his breath. Luke should know better than to show Michael more reasons to love him when he’s feeling like that.

He snorts, looking away from Luke and to Tati.

“Yes, I do,” she nods, making a face. “Dennis is mean.”

Luke chuckles lowly, smiling at her. “I don’t think he’s mean. He’s just… Why do you think he’s mean?”

“Because he doesn’t like me,” Michael elaborates, and gives impulse on his swing to get closer to Tati, so he can bump his swing to hers. She giggles a bit at that, looking at Michael appreciatively, but Luke glares at him, like he isn’t helping.

“It’s just that,” she starts, frowning deeply, closing her eyes and only opening them a tiny bit, as if she’s narrowing them. “Dennis only spends time with Harry. Especially now, that Harry’s not feeling good because of Ashton. Plus he’s been arguing with Mum a lot. He wants to fight, I think, but he says he only wants to train. But she says he can’t, because he doesn’t have his magick yet.” She pauses again, eyes opening properly, looking at Michael and then at Luke. “I know he wants to help. But he says mean things sometimes because Mum won’t let him train.”

Michael and Luke exchange a look.

Touching her arm lightly so she looks at him, Michael asks: “Why is Harry not feeling good? Why is it because of Ashton, Tati?”

“He’s leaving again,” Tati shrugs, making a face. “Poor Harry. Barely got here, but he’s leaving.”

Luke turns to Michael with a heavy sigh. “Annika and Nate. He wants to go after them.”

“But they’re coming tomorrow,” Michael says. Luke parts his lips, but Michael cuts him off. “I know. Ashton doesn’t know that. Who do you think is fueling this?”

Luke considers this, frowning.

Tati frowns, too. “Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”

Michael turns to her, smiling fondly. “Nah,” and bumps his swing to hers again.

It makes her giggle, so she doesn’t notice what Michael does: the shadow of concern that passes Luke’s face, as he looks away, catching his piercing between his teeth. Sure Michael knows what rhetoric stands for. Asking something when both parties already know the answer, for effect purposes. Luke’s right -- it wasn’t rhetoric to ask Daryl all that he did, because he came from that conversation with a shitload of information he couldn’t have cooked up in his messy head in his worst hours. But that question right there, was. 

Who better to fuel Ashton to go against the rules?

Jack. Of course Jack.

* * *

After Tati leaves, Luke has that look on his face. “Can you talk to Ashton?” he asks.

Michael doesn’t have to ask why. He knows who Luke will be busy with.

He just nods, even if he has no idea where to start looking. Luke nods back, as if in understanding, silent comprehension apparently going between them but that turns out to be very one-sided. Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, just Luke in front of him, and Luke presses his lips to Michael’s in a bit of an absentminded way. 

It’s alright, though, because Michael knows what it’s like, being preocuppied with family. It isn’t alright, though, because Michael doesn’t know what it’s like, to be preocuppied with a sibling.

* * *

The last place Michael wants to go looking for Ashton is the Big House, so he wanders around town mindlessly, like he’ll be somehow presented with an epiphany, or just Ashton materializing in front of him. It’s strange in ways he couldn’t describe, looking at the houses and the people, and knowing that, according to the vision shown to Cameron, the scattered version of the vision he saw himself, he’ll be guiding these people out of here.

He knows best than to fall for the myth of an almighty leader. He knows it’s not him.

If anything, it should be Daryl.

Unless The Trinity developed a sense of humor and only shown Cameron a fraction of the truth, and Michael is actually useless, he’ll be the one telling everyone which way to go so they can leave Death Valley. But that doesn’t mean anything when it comes to the big fight, and guiding people out doesn’t make him a specially skilled savior. The label seems to be sticking, and he hates it -- it should feel relieving, to know that people like Nicole, Cameron, Joel and Benji are pledging allegiance to him, but the purpose was lost somewhere. They seem to think he has a plan, when he only ever gets bits and pieces of other people’s. If he’s honest with himself, he doesn’t even know the full story of why Daryl wants to go to the city after Annika and Nathan come back.

Everyone’s playing chess, and he’s still playing checkers. He has next to no clue what’s happening, and yet he’s expected to save the day. He can’t even think of one reasonable scenario in which he could save his family. His mother’s been in hiding for the past few months apparently, his father preparing to poison what he calls targets and likely get himself killed in the process, and Scarlet… is out there somewhere. Probably not knowing he knows about her. 

It’s unnerving, is what it is, not upsetting or enraging but unnerving. Makes his fingertips tingle with anticipation and his throat feel funny with dread, because he knows he’s not ready. 

Whatever comes, he’s not ready at all.

Predictably, after walking around town for what must have been around an hour, he just ends up going in circles. He nods acknowledging to a few people, sees Geordie very briefly -- but she’s talking with Diana, and Diana gives him weird looks, so he doesn’t approach them --, but no Ashton. He ends up going to the Big House, not only because Ashton is very likely there, but also because he’d have to go back sooner or later anyway.

Daryl’s never downstairs. He’s always either in his bedroom, in his office, or simply not in the house at all. Michael only saw him in the kitchen once. And yet, just because things are weird between them since their conversation yesterday, he’s the first person Michael sees when he sets foot in the house.

His father gives him a half-smile, and Michael shifts his weight to the other foot.

“Um,” he frowns. “Hi.”

Daryl nods his way slowly, Caleb growing very quiet between them. “Hello, Michael,” Daryl says, and his voice sounds weird and hoarse, like he’s been yelling. Michael pictures him losing it, throwing things around in his office, but the image seems far-fetched even in his head. Daryl turns to Caleb again. “Can you or can you not do that?”

Caleb swallows, tense.

“I…” he pauses. Frowning, he presses his lips together, like it’s both physically difficult to keep looking Daryl in the eye and threatening to look away. He looks a mess, conflicted between the two equally bad options, and Daryl’s eyes on him are hard. It’s absolutely mind-blowing for Michael to see his father’s effect on others again after yesterday, after seeing him tear-eyed talking about his dead and soon-to-be-dead children, about his parents, about his early life. “I understand.”

Michael gives Daryl an unimpressed look, standing a few feet behind Caleb, but in an angle where he can see them both. It doesn’t make Daryl look away from Caleb, or change the way he’s looking at the Champion.

“That’s not what I asked. I know you understand. You speak English, I believe,” he cocks an eyebrow, lowering his voice. It makes his voice sound even thicker, throatier, something different. Caleb averts his eyes finally, nodding quickly. Daryl snorts. “I asked you if you can do it.”

“I can,” Caleb says. “I will.”

Michael circles Caleb slowly, mostly to try and figure out what they’re talking about, get some clues, but also a bit surprised at the whole thing. With his eyebrows raised, he stops beside Daryl. Caleb looks like there’s something foul under his nose. Absolutely contrary to whatever he’s just agreed to do. Caleb gives Michael a greeting look and the smallest pathetic bows, that Michael really wishes he’d stop doing, since Michael isn’t proper royalty, and neither is Daryl.

“Anything else?” Caleb asks. 

He sighs heavily. It’s clearly a mistake. Daryl stares at him. 

Clearing his throat, Caleb blinks a couple of times. “Not that I would mind. Anything for my king,” he forces a toothy smile. It’s way too much, and it makes Michael want to laugh, but he bites the insides of his cheeks, chuckling lowly. Daryl doesn’t.

“That’s all. Thank you, Caleb,” he says, simply.

Caleb nods in understanding, turns and leaves towards the corridor of Champion rooms.

Just like that, Daryl turns to leave as well, going upstairs. Michael catches up, going two at a time until he meets Daryl in the middle of the way. He raises his eyebrows, trying to smile. “What was that about? Seemed intense.” 

He’s not sure what he expected Daryl to say.

Fourth world war. Chaos witches singlehandedly taking over the world. All with one very unlikely but well-orchestrated command from Daryl, executed by his most loyal lackey. 

Michael probably needs to get some sleep.

Daryl gestures dismissively. “Just made him Halsey’s bodyguard. He’s not looking forward to it, and neither is she, but I don’t care.” Michael blinks a couple of times, gets ahead of Daryl and stops in front of him, so Daryl’s forced to stop walking as well. Daryl gives him an annoyed look, but stops. “What is it?”

“Elaborate,” he says, slowly, and then adds: “Please?”

He doesn’t know why he smiles that way, though it does get Daryl to chuckle.

It’s bizarre. He grew up to be disgusted and terrified of the man. For many, many years of his life, he was. And now, he should be angry. He should still be furious that Daryl is passing on on their chance of being a family for a stupid cause and leaving tomorrow, and yet here Michael is, tilting his head to the side in a charming yet absolutely ridiculous way, making his father smile.

Daryl sighs.

“I don’t want Halsey around tomorrow when Nathan and Annika arrive. It’d be bad for her, somebody else getting to be the Head Champion when she had the title for so long,” Daryl starts, lifting his shoulder and looking away. Michael frowns a bit, but says nothing to that. “I don’t want her exposed to that type of thing. We’ll start planning the Champions’ part on the mission immediately after I communicate them of who the new Head is. They’ll leave just a few days after me.”

Michael parts his lips, but his voice doesn’t come.

Daryl gives him an understanding look. “You’re thinking about Luke, and the fact that he’s a Champion. Look, he doesn’t have to go on the mission if he doesn’t want to. None of them do. In fact, he can resign his position if he wants to, now that you’re here. He doesn’t have to go to the city if you don’t want him to.”

He breathes out slowly, tries to make his smile look the least cynical he can, though it’s hard. “It never even crossed my mind that he would go with the second team. If he wanted to, we’d discuss the possibility together, because I know he wouldn’t want to just leave me,” he says. Daryl snorts, looks away, shakes his head, as if thinking: _This again_ , so Michael says: “This again. I know. Repetitive and shit,” Michael shrugs, and snorts just like his father had too. “But I just… I don’t know why I thought you may reconsider it. Push it just a few weeks.”

Daryl doesn’t tell him he’ll think about it. His mouth says nothing.

His eyes say _please, please stop_. 

So he stops. It makes his stomach flip, but he stops.

He turns to the side, as if to give way for Daryl to pass, and takes a deep breath. Daryl takes tentative steps towards his bedroom, but he seems to be stalling. Michael is, too, so he gets it. “So you made Caleb, from all people, Halsey’s bodyguard? You could have chosen Luke, since he’s very probably not going anyway, and it wouldn’t be as painful to either of-- why does she need a bodyguard?” he frowns.

Daryl shrugs. “Annika is complicated. She can get very violent, and if Halsey’s not the Head Champion anymore… I feel she may think I favored Halsey over the years.”

Ah. Complicated.

Michael’s growing to loathe the word.

He gives his father a look. “Did you?”

Daryl smirks.

Michael shakes his head with a small smile, insistent on hips lips. He doesn’t think Daryl knows why Cameron doesn’t like Halsey, thinks maybe Nicole is the only who knows, other than him. He doesn’t really believe Halsey knows what she’ll eventually do to Michael, how she’ll turn on him, and that’s both the strangest and cruelest part.

“She’s not speaking to me,” Daryl says, as an after-thought.

They’re standing in the middle of the corridor of the second floor of the Big House, making small talk, or maybe incredibly important talk, but still struggling their way through it, because this is new. It’s new, and Michael wants to hold onto it.

“Why’s that?” he raises his eyebrows, voice low.

Daryl looks at him. “All my children have terrible taste for partners,” he wrinkles his nose but, Michael’s almost a hundred per cent sure, it’s supposed to be a joke. A proper joke. He raises his eyebrows higher still, a smile spreading over his lips like he has no control at all over his face. Daryl looks away briefly before moving on. “I don’t… I don’t mind Luke. Scarlet has… she has her stories, too, and while I disapprove, I understand her motivations and she’s her own person.” Michael cocks an eyebrow, wondering how come Scarlet gets to have partners that Daryl disapproves of but he still lets it slide, and Michael got the speech about how Luke couldn’t truly love him because of the prophecy. “But it’s different with Geordie. I wish Halsey would see that.”

“Geordie is awesome,” he says, as a knee-jerk reaction.

You are your knee-jerk reaction, and his is the possibly least eloquent response in the world.

But it’s honest. He means it.

Daryl gives him a look, like he’s confiding in Michael. “It’s going to be dangerous to be human very soon. It already is, with the attack on the village, with the body count. But it’s about to get worse. I honestly hope Geordie makes it, but I don’t believe she will. All I wanted was for all of you to have people in your life that could actually stay.”

 _Like I couldn’t. Like I can’t._ Daryl doesn’t say it, but Michael still hears it.

It’s far too personal now, Daryl giving him that meaningful look that makes him feel choked up.

The crypticism of what he says gets lost because of the rest.

“I’ll,” Michael starts, then immediately stops. His voice sounds weird, and he has to take a deep breath, clear his throat. “I’ll go to my room now. Think I’m going to read a bit if that’s okay. Books you couldn’t pay me to read when I was in school, now I’m reading by choice. Guess that’s what happens when you take away the TV and the computer,” he snorts.

It’s a dumb attempt at humor to distract Daryl from how he’s pretty sure he can’t take any hint at emotional conversation between them, but Daryl seems to fall for it, or pretend he does with enough grace. He half-smiles, nods slowly, and just when Michael’s turning to go to his room, Daryl parts his lips to add something else.

“You know, Luke was always closest to Benji, when he was younger. But he went to Joel with every piece of information he found on the capital. They shared that interest, in a way I never saw other two people have.” Michael stops, looks at Daryl, feels something in his chest tighten. “For Joel, it was always about his children. Nicole got pregnant of Tati young, not long after they adopted Dennis. Joel desperately wanted their children to have all the fancy things Order witches do,” he pauses, presses his lips together. Michael can’t tell whether it’s because he thinks it’s bullshit, or because he feels guilty that, in a way, he could offer those luxuries to his children. “But Luke… he started going on missions very young. Safe missions, of course, his safety was always very important to me, especially after…. especially after a bad incident,” he gestures dismissively. They lock eyes for a second. Michael tries to pretend like he doesn’t know what Daryl’s talking about, and Daryl pretends like he buys it. “Luke’s fascination with the city had to do with opportunities. Jack used to use the computer to hack into websites we wouldn’t normally have access in this part of the country, and print school materials to Luke. He just couldn’t teach him anything, because he never had it, either.”

Michael sets his jaw, looking away. “Luke mentioned that Chaos witches don’t really get much education past learning how to write and read.”

“Sometimes we don’t even get that far,” Daryl cocks an eyebrow, bitterly. “Luke especially, he was always interested in studying. If he had been born Order, and never learned to fight for his life at all, he’d be just starting college, just like all your old classmates.” 

The thought makes that something in his heart drop. 

He swallows the lump in his throat, lowers his voice.

“Why are you even talking about Luke and schools?” he tries to chuckle. It sounds shallow.

“Because we’re about to change the future for people like Luke,” Daryl tells him. It shocks him, the ease with which he says it, and when he looks at him, the hopefulness in his eyes. It makes Michael hold his breath. Daryl smiles. “Chaos witches deserve to not be interested in mandatory school reading. But for that, they have to be offered the chance to study -- no, not chance, the _right_. Michael, I don’t want any other Chaos witch to be sitting in the dark staring at illegal printed school materials, trying to understand on their own what no one can help them with. You and Luke could both still go to college when this is over.”

Michael presses his lips together.

Daryl looks at him like he absolutely believes it’s that simple.

Michael wishes he could, too.

If Daryl understands the sadness in Michael’s eyes, he does nothing about it. Maybe he just doesn’t know his son well enough to see what’s his version of a smile out of sympathy, almost pity.

Michael still feels like he’s in the dark, and he may not know what’s out there, but one thing he knows for sure: _it’s complicated._

* * *

“I didn’t find Ashton,” is the first thing Michael tells Luke, raising his eyes from an old book from before the third World War, of humans against witches; a book about a man transformed into a cockroach. “I’m sorry.”

It’s only sort of a lie. He did look for Ashton, before he ran into Daryl and Caleb, and then his priority changed. But Luke doesn’t seem like he’s about to catch Michael in his half-lie. He’s storming into the room, leaving the door open as he does, sitting on the bed next to Michael right after. Michael puts the book down, his index finger marking the page where he stopped, and Luke stares at him with a frustrated look.

“You didn’t find him because he was there with Jack,” he says. 

“Ah,” Michael looks away, trying to hide his relief. Luke doesn’t really see it.

“Mikey,” he starts, frowning, “why is my brother a complete idiot?”

Michael smiles at that. “Because all our relatives are idiots,” he says, simply. It gets a smile from Luke, but it isn’t enough to make the frown go away, so Michael puts the book away, even though he’s going to have to flip through the pages to find the page where he was in when he goes back to it. He searches for Luke’s hands, taking them both in his hands and turning to the side so he’s facing him. The first thought that crosses his mind is that Luke, unlike Daryl, is very okay with Michael touching him. And it shouldn’t be as weird as it is, realizing that his boyfriend’s expression softens when he’s doing it, that he squeezes back immediately. Michael realizes the two relationships are way too different, but still-- “Jack doesn’t mean any harm. You know that.”

“Do I?” he asks.

You are what your knee-jerk reaction is, and Luke’s is giving Michael a scared little look, questioning things he shouldn’t be. Michael looks away, because it’s too heavy, and so does Luke.

Just in case, Luke squeezes his hands once more, and Michael squeezes back on impulse, chuckling lowly, staring at how their hands look together, Michael’s skin a bit paler than Luke’s, Luke’s hands looking more delicate than his, against all odds.

“I confronted Jack about it… He’s treating me like a child, saying I don’t understand, saying something’s wrong with this whole Annika and Nate thing, that he’d go looking for himself but he can’t because Daryl’s a dick and is keeping him prisoner,” he pauses, like he’s just realized what he said. He looks at Michael, presses his lips together, and sighs softly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean--”

“It’s okay,” Michael smiles quietly, “go on.”

Luke nods cautiously, taking a deep breath. “Ashton thinks there’s something off with Annika and Nate too. It’s not normal at all for anyone to take so long to come, to keep communication to a minimum like they did. And even with what Daryl told you… No word from Annika, isn’t that right?” he raises his eyebrows. Michael nods. “Well. I get it. I do. But I told them that they’re coming tomorrow, and Ashton decided not to go, since, you know, the whole purpose of going was to find what’s up with them. But I got into a fight with Jack. I hate that he keeps things from me.”

The frustration is palpable, and Michael wishes he could kiss it away.

He doesn’t. Instead he lets go of Luke’s hands so he can get properly closer, so he can wrap his arms around him. And Luke lets himself be held, hugging him back and closing his eyes as he rests his face on Michael’s shoulder.

It’s their room. It’s their world. It’s their bubble. And it works wonders.

Michael kisses the top of his head, and even though the door is open, he still feels like no one would dare interrupt this. The quiet type of smile keeps present in his lips because it’s hard not to smile with Luke so close, even if his head is still revisiting all the worst places, and his heart’s the perpetual lump in his throat.

“Ashton won’t go anywhere. Jack has nothing to worry about. Tomorrow your friends come back home, and then everything will be alright.”

Luke raises his head from Michael’s shoulder, giving him a serious look.

“You know that’s not right. Tomorrow they come back, and then your dad is leaving. You know what happens next is war.”

Michael takes a deep breath.

“War is what has been happening before we were even born. It never stopped before, did it? It’s what happened before and what will happen next. We can’t stop ourselves from the most important thing just because of war.”

Luke gives him a curious look. “And what is that?”

“Living.”

* * *

Sometimes, when it’s the night and Luke’s asleep, Michael practices his magick by himself.

It’s weird but at the same time liberating. He closes his eyes and breathes in deeply, and in the dark he watches the lights light up as he opens his eyes and sees a different world. It’s always first his Order magick, feeling everything in an enhanced way, listening to the far away whistle of the wind that barely gets to Death Valley at all, the soft noises from the magick that serves them for sun day and night, only the slightest difference between the two, and of course, to Luke.

Sometimes he just focuses on Luke’s breath, to make sure he’s still breathing.

Especially after seeing himself leading the Chaos people out of Death Valley, the hard look on his face, the scar and what happened to his ear, Luke nowhere in sight… especially then, it soothes him to just roll his eyes back and make sure Luke’s still breathing.

He gets bored of it soon, though. And that’s when he has to focus more, and feels it licking at his ankles first. It’s always either the ankles or his wrists, and then he sees the world in yet a different light. The things he can connect with, he can change. He can break them. He can remake them. And he isn’t brave to do either. 

Still, he feels the need to practice it -- the responsibility, even. 

It starts small and stupid. He focuses on things he can’t do something dramatic about. He spreads his fingertips slowly, connecting to the bed sheets, and feels the texture of it in his palms without touching it. He tries expanding the material, and has ripped the sheets in three different places by accident, but Luke has either not noticed or said nothing about it. But he manages to do it right sometimes.

Right now, in the quiet of the night, he stares at the scars around his wrists for being hung by them in the Order Prison for so long, and shaking his head lightly, he closes his eyes. It takes a deep breath, and then his Chaos comes to him effortlessly, like a soft wave that calms him instead of alarming him. He connects to the bed sheets, like he usually does, because it’s harmless and he needs to try it just once more. 

He spreads his fingertips slowly, picturing his hands connected to the dead molecules of the inanimate object over him, and he feels it expand. Michael chuckles lowly, proud of himself for the smallest of accomplishments. 

Then someone knocks on his door.

He clears his throat, blinks his eyes back, and the sheets look odd, enlarged in only one side, but he doesn’t do anything about it. He turns to Luke, but his face is half-buried on his pillow, and he looks like nothing could wake him up. Michael smiles quietly, and gets off the bed.

With a yawn, he opens the door.

It’s Ashton.

His nose is a just a bit red and he looks tired. 

Michael steps outside with a sigh, and says: “You’ve been out,” he raises his eyebrows. Ashton shrugs and points down the stairs, so Michael starts his way there, Ashton following next to him. “Should I ask why the fuck you’re knocking on our door when everyone’s asleep?”

Ashton smirks. “That would be reasonable, yes.”

Smiling at him, he asks: “What is it?”

“Jack wants to talk to you. Without Luke.”

In the middle of their way downstairs, Michael pauses, giving Ashton a weird look, or at least what he hopes is a weird look. He does feel weird about this. It sort of feels like the type of thing that needs a build-up first, but Ashton’s tired and a little cold and probably can’t wait to go back to bed. 

Michael blinks a couple of times.

“You do realize you could’ve woken Luke up when you knocked, right? What would you say?”

Ashton shrugs. “Luke never accepts to be woken up unless someone’s dragging him out of bed.”

“Good point,” Michael half-smiles, just to have something to do. 

They keep walking in silence until they’re downstairs, and then Michael points at the little step before the entrance, and Ashton goes to sit there with him, even though he looks reluctant, like he’d rather not. Michael presses his lips together, frowning, trying to think of words.

Ashton beats him to it. “Luke probably told you about today. It’s not like he thinks at all. I wanted to look for Annika and Nate because there’s something wrong. He said Daryl told you they’re coming tomorrow, that they sent a message earlier this week, but I don’t buy it.”

Michael snorts, without looking at Ashton. “Why would Daryl lie about that?”

“I don’t think he lied,” Ashton says, slowly, “I think he was lied to.”

Sighing, he keeps his eyes ahead. “Can we not with the conspiracy theories? For two minutes?”

Ashton snorts, looks ahead too.

This is not what any of them needs. 

It’s just that Michael’s tired of second-guessing, tired of everything not being what it seems like, and for once, this one small detail that these two strangers are coming home, he’d like to believe in it and just take it and not think that there’s something else about it. Jack is probably the one making Ashton become a doubter himself, and it’s unnerving. Michael can see why Luke’s mad at his brother. It doesn’t help anyone. If anything, it just makes them all drift apart some more.

“Tati told us Harry was sad about you supposedly leaving again.”

Ashton sighs softly, a swift in the atmosphere, but still not significant enough that this becomes comfortable. “I’m not going anymore. Even though I don’t think… I’m not going. I’ll wait for them to come back and see what happens.”

“I know, but,” Michael turns to him, still frowning a little. “It’s been so long since the last time you were here with your brother, Ash. Turn off fight mode for at least a few days. Stop looking for something to be worried about. Just enjoy your time with him. He’s your brother. He’ll appreciate it so, so much.”

The way Ashton looks at him, is like as if he could tell that this is personal for Michael.

But he doesn’t ask.

Instead he averts his eyes from Michael’s, and lifts his shoulders in a non-committed shrug. Michael can’t pretend he really understands sibling bonds, at least not as well as he wishes he could. His voice suddenly small, he asks: “Your sister’s in the capital, undercover in the army, right?” Ashton nods. Michael licks his lips. “Do you miss her?”

“Yeah, but,” Ashton shrugs again. “We’re always missing each other all the time. It’s the type of life we chose when we chose Chaos. It’s alright,” he smiles. 

It’s a smile that tells Michael it’s anything but alright. 

Michael chuckles, nodding slowly.

“Alright,” he says.

Ashton stands up to leave, pats Michael’s shoulder in the process. He’s already turned to get back inside, maybe finally go back to his room, when Michael turns in his direction once more and calls his name. Ashton turns, and Michael takes a deep breath. 

“Look, I know it’s none of my business. But I thought you liked Dylan, not Jack.”

The shape-shifter parts his lips, looking at Michael in surprise. Michael wishes he could take it back the second he sees Ashton’s eyes go down in sadness. He can tell he misses Dylan the most, even more than his sister, and he doesn’t know how that could be. He thinks he misses Scarlet without ever really having met her, with everything pointing that he should be glad they’ve never met. But to Ashton it’s different. Michael doesn’t know what it’d be like, if he suddenly didn’t have Luke by his side anymore, like Ashton had Dylan all their lives before their missions changed, and Ashton was taken to prison.

“It’s complicated, alright?” he asks.

He sounds way more tired than he looks.

Michael nods slowly, and he doesn’t hate the word this time. He’d apologize for having asked, but instead what he asks is: “Do you remember everything from the time you were guarding The Trinity and saw Luke?”

Ashton tilts his head to the side, as if he can’t connect the two topics. 

“Yeah, like…” Michael sighs. “I’m not going to ask you to tell me what you saw. If Luke doesn’t want to know exactly what happened, then I figure I shouldn’t want to know, either. I’m not asking you to tell me that. I just want to know if you remember it clearly or if it’s foggy or something.”

Ashton looks away from him, presses his lips together, and frowns.

“It’s never clear, but sometimes I remember a little more. Sometimes I think I’m making up half of it. People like you and me -- witches -- we’re not meant to see things like that. The Trinity was supposed to be a watcher, you know that? Just a watcher, observing all the shitty choices we make so the world comes to its full circle. But both witches and humans have been hunting the prophet down and making her share what she knows about the future. Sometimes I think it’s just because she’s pissed off, cursing us with the truth so we can’t run away from it,” he smiles weakly, lifting his shoulders. “I don’t know. But nobody sees any of it clearly. The truth is too much for us, and we rarely want to know it. So far, both in the city and in here, I’ve only met one person who remembers the visions clearly.”

Michael half-smiles, staring at his hands. “Cameron.”

Ashton nods.

And it bothers him a little, knowing that Ashton’s probably tired and needs to go to his room and sleep, but Michael can’t stop the questions from coming, can’t keep his mind from working fast even when all he preaches is that they all could use a break. It makes him feel like a hypocrite, but the restlessness never really goes away, not after the first time he blew up that damn table by accident and used his Chaos magick for the first time.

Not since the first time he let himself be Chaotic. 

He knows in a couple of minutes he’ll have to leave the house and walk the streets of Death Valley to Jack’s lab, see what is it that was so important that Luke couldn’t have known, that he’d asked Ashton to take Michael out of bed in the middle of the night to talk to him about. 

But that’s in a couple of minutes. Now his mind is still racing.

“Just. Just one more thing,” Michael turns to him again, even if it’s hard to ask and look him in the eye at the same time. He makes an effort, though, keeping his voice quiet and his eyes firm. “And don’t be upset that I’m asking, please. I need to ask someone,” he breathes in, and releases his breath slowly. Ashton narrows his eyes, but doesn’t move. “It’s about the attack on the human village,” he starts, and Ashton immediately looks away from him, shifting his weight to the other foot, clearly uncomfortable. “Someone who knows Death Valley gave them the coordinates, just not clearly enough that they knew to find a way underground. And at the time, Luke wasn’t any near, he was still in the city, rescuing me. You weren’t here either, for that matter. I guess what I’m trying to ask is…” he pauses, frowning, and struggles with keeping his eyes on Ashton even if Ashton won’t look back. His voice comes out weird when he speaks next. “Do you think it could have been Jack?”

Ashton takes a deep breath, finally meeting his eyes again.

“I’ve been wondering the same thing every day, since we got here. I have no idea.”


	29. we got our methods and there's nothing here to stop this

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from _white teeth teens_ by lorde. super ridiculously excited to post this chapter, as the next one is what i hope will be the written story version of a season finale. but before chapter 30 arrives, i certainly hope you enjoy 29, and all its complications and revelations. don't forget to let me know if you have any theories! with that being said, HAPPY READING!!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

The lights inside are all on, and he doesn’t have to knock. 

The door is ajar, so he just pushes it open, making himself at home, even if not really. Even if he’s nervous. Even if his mind is racing and so is his pulse. Even if he’s absolutely terrified. Not of Jack, per se, but at the same time, it is all Jack. It isn’t that he thinks Jack might hurt him, but that he’s afraid whatever Michael finds out today, will hurt Luke on the long run.

If that wasn’t the case, there’d be no reason to ask Ashton to drag him out of bed late at night.

“Jack,” Michael greets him with a half-smile, shifting his weight to the other foot, still by the door. He doesn’t close the door behind him yet, because Jack’s not even looking at him. Jack’s sitting in front of a microscope, staring at something. He raises his index finger for Michael to stop, so Michael frowns, staring at him.

It takes a second for Jack to be done with whatever he’s doing, and then look away from it and to Michael. He looks like he hasn’t gotten any sleep, and it twists his stomach a bit to think that Ashton and Jack were together. It’s a strange feeling, so he pushes it aside, and gives Jack a long look. Jack notices the door, and instead of saying hello, he says: “Close the door, Michael.”

The tone comes with a scowling, and Michael snorts, shaking his head lightly but doing as told anyway. “So you want to talk to me,” Michael starts, “but you won’t be nice to me. Oh my God, I think that’s a first.”

Jack doesn’t react at all. Instead he gives himself some impulse so his chair goes to the other side of the long desk. There are some printed papers on top, and he flips through them for a couple of seconds, Michael standing idly by the door, feeling more and more like an idiot by the second, and then finally, as if this is just part of their ongoing conversation, Jack announces:

“It was the last of that eye drug. Daryl told me I don’t have to make more. But I suppose he really believes in go big or go home,” he says. 

Michael shifts his weight to the other foot uncomfortably, looking away.

“Just say what you want to say, Jack.”

Jack looks at him. Really, really looks at him. From head to toe, Jack examines him as if he’s trying to detect a shift, and it must catch his eye, because he frowns, tilting his head up just a bit, staring at Michael. “But my days are very uneventful. I enjoy building the suspense.”

Rolling his eyes, Michael gets closer. He walks to the first table, sits on it like he had the first time he came around, before Caleb showed up too. He pulls his legs up and sits cross-legged for a second, just avoiding Jack’s eyes. When he finally gives in and looks at him, Jack gives him a little forced smile that makes Michael shake his head and forcing a dry laugh out.

“What?”

“You have a secret,” Jack says, slowly, “and it shows.”

Michael shrugs. “Yeah, and it doesn’t concern your brother, so you don’t care. It’s my business.”

Jack narrows his eyes, head tilting to the side a bit. “You know who gets the eye drug in the city,” he starts. Michael can’t help that he frowns, looking at Jack, and it’s Jack’s turn to shrug. “You flinched when I talked about it. You know who it’s going to, and you care about them,” he raises his voice just a tiny bit in the end of the sentence, like a question.

Staring at him across the room, Michael sighs. “I want to know if the drug is safe, or if you did something to it. Last time I heard you talk about it… you didn’t seem very eager to help.”

“I’m never eager to help,” he adds, as an after-thought, and Michael half-smiles, looking away. “But yeah, the drug is alright. I guess I _should_ ask, but if it’s not about Luke, then, let’s be honest, I probably really don’t care,” he lifts his shoulders. 

They hold eye-contact for a moment, before Michael drops his head between his shoulders, chuckling lowly and looking down. “So what did you mean, Jack? The thing you said about going big or going home? Why am I here?”

Jack tsks. 

For once, he sounds nervous. 

Michael hasn’t seen a lot of that, and it’s very, very weird for him.

It must have to do with the image he’s built in his head for Jack. Smarter than everyone, but in a cunning way, not simply clever. Faster than everyone, too. Motivated and focused and just a tiny little bit manipulative. Only that’s not a tiny little bit. Only that’s maybe a lot. 

Which doesn’t go to say that he’s a liar. Just that he’s always has a reason to choose to reveal the bits of the truth in the way that he does, in the timing that he does. Especially if it’s against Daryl.

“Daryl got the last supplies of the eye drug, like I said. I asked if I should start making more immediately, or if there’s another priority, since he’s my gatekeeper and apparently owner,” he gives Michael a sly smile, but Michael ignores it. “He said no. He said from today on, I should only have one priority, and he needs it done by tomorrow night. It’s sort of funny, when you think about it, because I know he needs me to have it done so he can do shit. If it’s not done by tomorrow night, then it’s not. He can cut my food if he wants, I really don’t care.”

Michael raises his eyebrows, though his heart’s not in it.

“And what’s that, Jack? What’s your priority?”

Jack flashes him a smile. 

“Opia.”

The silence between them expands.

Michael takes a deep breath, still staring at Jack through the distance, but Jack still keeps that borderline megalomaniac look on his face, like he’s just told Michael the most important piece of news he’ll ever hear, and he doesn’t catch the clue that Michael’s still silent and his eyebrows are still raised.

“What the fuck is an Opia?”

Jack looks like he’s been slapped. “What’s a-- Not _an_ Opia, you idiot. No article. Just Opia. Have you seriously never heard about it at all in the Order-powered city supposedly filled with smart people and smart books?” he mocks, the corner of his mouth going up.

Michael’s this close to flipping him off and walking away, but he doesn’t move.

Instead he takes a deep breath. “No, Jack. I don’t know what’s Opia.”

“Unbelievable,” Jack shakes his head with a little snort, apparently having a good time. Michael’s starting to think maybe this was a waste of time, and maybe he can fall asleep again fast if he’s done here soon. Jack stands up, walks closer to him, but not so close that Michael feels compelled to look away. “Opia is a different type of drug. It’s an eyedrop as well, but different. It’s rare because it’s difficult to make. You need shit like blood for that, like magick essences, only found in DNAs of people with specific magicks. We’re talking overly complicated, invasive, and severely dangerous. Messes up with your head sometimes.”

Michael narrows his eyes, shifting on the table a bit, suddenly uncomfortable.

“What does it do?”

“Gives you power, of course,” he half-smiles, but he doesn’t look proud and smug anymore. He looks concerned, even on top of everything. Michael presses his lips together, and Jack sighs softly, looking away for a bit before meeting his eyes again. “It enhances your magick. Whatever it is that you have, it gives you full control, and expands your power in an unimaginable way.”

Considering it for just a split second makes him nauseous. He thinks of what would happen if he took it, if he had full control of changing matter, if he could expand it so much as to have control over everything. The thought makes him fidgety and a little sick. 

There’s a lump in his throat, but Michael ignores it.

“And why would you be capable of putting together something like that?” he snorts.

He’s buying time, trying to get Jack busy with talking so he can think. But it doesn’t work, not in the way he’d expected. Instead of glaring at him and going on a rant about his abilities, instead Jack just keeps his eyes serious and his expression hard, almost like he’s remorseful. He says: “Because I’ve done it before. I’ve cooked up Opia in this lab so many times I’d lost count.”

He holds his breath. “For Daryl?”

Jack looks away. “No, never for Daryl. He’s mastered his magick just fine over the years. It wasn’t for him that I was doing it, though he obviously knows, just pretended like he didn’t until he needed it.” He pauses, and Michael isn’t sure he wants to know. There’s a thought in the back of his head, pieces coming together, and he doesn’t want it, can’t have, wants the opposite of what he’s about to hear. But Jack doesn’t care for what he wants or needs. He cares for the selective bits of truth that he’s chosen to reveal before Michael walked in. “Halsey was first. Daryl was training her magick, and telekinesis can be a real shitty magick for fighting unless you can control air to an extent that you can cut someone’s air supply,” he raises his eyebrows.

Michael gives him a weak smiles. “Real effective, too. I was on the receiving end of that trick once,” he says, reticent tone making Jack look away with a low chuckle. Michael sighs. “So Halsey. She wanted to impress Daryl and make everyone else jealous of how together she was, probably?”

“Yeah, but,” Jack frowns, making a face. “Opia doesn’t work like that. It works for a full hour if you’re lucky. She just kept coming back more, and I said okay, as long as she gave me some of her blood so I’d still have the essence of telekinesis.”

His eyes widen a bit, and the nausea comes back. He looks away. “That’s sick.”

“She wasn’t the only one, just the first,” Jack says, and, again, he doesn’t seem proud. He avoids Michael’s eyes but goes on. “They all came eventually. Even Caleb, who can’t fucking stand me, wanted a taste when they went to battle. Days where they had to fight they’d all come to me.”

Michael’s eyes are focused on the floor. “Even Ashton?”

“Especially Ashton.”

Michael thinks he’s done. Michael hopes he is. 

Of course he isn’t.

“Last time I’d made Opia was for Ashton. He came to Death Valley just for the damn thing, didn’t even see his brother, didn’t want anyone to find out he was here. It was about a year and a half ago, maybe two years. He wanted all he could have, and I took about a liter of his blood. He was weak as fuck after, but a deal is a deal. He wanted more, I needed more too.”

He raises his eyes to Jack, frowning. “You’re a fucking asshole. You’re their dealer.”

Jack averts his eyes, sighing. “Aren’t you going to ask me about Luke?”

Michael snorts. “Luke wouldn’t. And if he had, he would’ve told me.”

There’s a tiny little pause between them, and slowly Jack raises an eyebrow, some of his cockiness back. “You think you know him so well,” he shakes his head a bit, like he pities Michael. Michael sets his jaw, feels his shoulders tensing, and if Jack notices, he isn’t threatened in the slightest bit. “He didn’t, but not because he wouldn’t. Because I didn’t let him. I told him it’d kill him, which it might,” he shrugs, looks away. “He’s been getting on my nerves to give him Opia since he was fourteen. I never did, but that’s my fucking golden star moment, not his. If it was up to him, he’d be taking it like all the other so-called Champions. But he never did, so he’s the weakest. Can’t do anything with his shitty magick, but he’s clean.”

“You’re full of shit,” Michael spits out, looking away.

“You think I’m lying?” he asks, letting out a half-laugh that sounds dry and pained.

“Oh, I know you’re not,” Michael meets his eyes, taking a deep breath. “But the fact that you actually seem to consider it an accomplishment that you didn’t hook your little brother in magick steroids says a lot about the type of person you are.”

Jack seems to struggle to stand still, to not come after Michael. He knows he’d lose.

“Well, not to be worried, because now your daddy is going to get some Opia, and it’s for him. His poison is already bad enough that he could take out twelve scientists by himself when he rescued Luke that one time he got those scars on his chest. Twelve people, Michael, and all he did was press a breathing mask of oxygen to Luke’s mouth, and the whole room was dead. Luke ever told you that?” he raises his eyebrows, smirking. Michael doesn’t say anything, and Jack tilts his head to the side, as if saying, _there you go_. “Why do you think he wants Opia, Michael?”

Michael keeps quiet.

He doesn’t need to play this game.

He needs to go back to the house, go back to bed, pretend this never happened.

“Why do you think he wants it?” Jack presses him, frowning and speaking louder. He takes a step in Michael’s direction, and even though a second ago he wouldn’t be opposed to connecting his fist to Jack’s jaw, now he feels threatened. Not by his fists. By what he knows. “He’s going to cause a fucking genocide, Michael. He’ll kill all the city.” 

“No,” he says, automatically, looking away from Jack.

“You can stop this from happening,” Jack says, narrowing his eyes. “I can try and delay it a couple of days, but not more than that. You can have enough time to go back to the city, find your mother, tell her about it so they can evacuate or get prepared or something. I don’t know. They know about Opia. They’ve used it for many more years than I have. I learned it from Halsey.”

He can’t breathe.

Michael looks at him, and he’s absolutely sure he can’t breathe.

Jack doesn’t stop, taking another step forward.

“And you haven’t even seen what people become when they’re on Opia. Even people who are loving and kind… I saw Annika rip a guy’s head from his neck once. Her magick is physical strength, so the shock wasn’t that she could, but that she would. Michael, he was Order. He knew stuff Daryl wanted to know. She just lost her fucking temper and ripped him apart in front of everybody.” 

Jack speaks fast, not pausing, blue eyes seeming bigger and bigger and even though they’re the same color as Luke’s, they couldn’t look more different. Michael tries his best to keep breathing, channels Luke’s voice to inside his head as if there was such thing, closes his eyes and turns away from Jack, with his lips parted, trying to suck in some air.

He can’t. He can’t fucking breathe and it’s getting worse.

“Take Luke,” Jack says, either ignorant to Michael or not caring. “Take him out of here and find Karen Gordon and whoever she may trust in Order. There’s something shady happening with Annika and Nathan, but as soon as they set foot in this city, Daryl will be out, and he’ll kill every single person in that city. That includes your mother. That includes everyone you ever cared for.”

He drops his head back, staring at the ceiling.

His mouth is open and his eyes are tearing up. Not because he’s sad, but because his throat is closing in panic, and his nostrils and lungs burn with the abuse, still getting no oxygen as reward.

The ceiling. 

Michael frowns a bit, still struggling against his own body, but the ceiling is dirty. There’s some weird stains in it, as if someone had somehow dropped coffee on the ceiling. That’s some weird gravity, requiring certainly some weird magick. It looks so much like the ceiling of the room 93 in the motel where he stayed with Luke, back when he was still there against his will.

And then, slowly, he started falling for the boy with the goggles who played with the ring around his lip in the dark. It was the room where Michael first heard about how everything he believed wasn’t worth believing in. It was the room where Michael first kissed him. 

The ugly dirty ceiling anchors him back.

He feels cold air entering his throat through his mouth, and it hurts to breathe like this, but his lungs fill in and out of air and he can breathe. Panting a little, but he can breathe.

“Daryl’s going to--”

“Shut the fuck up, Jack,” he says, in between pants.

He feels like laughing a bit, just because he’s managed to regain control over his own body, and Jack doesn’t understand that. Jack’s frowning at him and still looking urgent and maniac, just like Luke does too when he’s got his blow-torch in hands and adrenaline is running high.

Because for Jack, adrenaline _is_ running high.

Michael takes a deep breath, revels in the fact that he can, and gets out from the table, standing closer to Jack. “This is why I’m here. After all this, you finally made your point,” he says, raising his eyebrows. Jack’s frown grows deeper in confusion, but he doesn’t move. “You want me to take Luke out of here, so the only person you care about is out of Death Valley. I thought you cared about Ashton, that you were maybe in love with Joel, but you’re too selfish to really care about anyone, isn’t that right?” he raises his eyebrows high. Jack, outraged, snorts and parts his lips to talk, but Michael interrupts him before he can start. “You’re so obsessed with Luke’s safety because you feel like it’s your job. And fuck, maybe that’s what’s like when you have a little brother, I’ll never fucking know because mine is dead!” he shrugs, taking another step forward. Jack takes a step backward, looking at Michael warily. “But you want me to take Luke out of here, so you can contact Order again, and this time, they won’t miss the location. They’ll blow up Death Valley, and you don’t even care that you’ll die, because you’ll take with you my father, who you keep blaming for everything, and also a thousand innocent people, but _whatever_.”

Jack finally snaps out of the shock, snorting loudly and walking around Michael so there’s some decent space between them again. He sounds both amused and a little desperate when he says: “You think I’m responsible for the attack on the human village. Super.”

Michael doesn’t turn around to look at him, but balls his fists and stares ahead, taking another deep breath. “You did. You’re the only one in here other than Daryl that has access to some sort of technology. Daryl told me you used to download schoolbooks for Luke. That’s Order. You had to find a way to hack Order computers for that, from far far away,” he finally does turn around, glaring at Jack. Jack cocks an eyebrow and parts his lips, but again Michael doesn’t let him speak. “Save it. I’m not going to tell Luke. Not because you deserve that I keep my mouth shut, but because the second he finds out, you’re dead to him, and I won’t be the one to kill his brother.”

Jack narrows his eyes, staring at Michael.

“You don’t know shit.”

Michael tilts his head to the side, and this time, he allows himself the smallest of smiles. “Oh, but you see, I think I do. I think you’ve been manipulating me since I got here, feeding me little pieces of the truth because you thought I’d react in a certain way, and I guess I played along.” He pauses, just very briefly, to see if Jack will try to speak over him. He doesn’t. “The only reason you told me that Daryl was just looking for an excuse to pick another Head Champion and never meant for her to kill Luke because you knew I’d confront him, you knew it’d be an uncomfortable situation for us, that I’d tell Luke and Halsey. You knew she’d start questioning him. Guess what? It backfired.”

“Did it?” he half-asks, half-states, but his voice is too small, almost like he doesn’t mean to interrupt Michael. Michael ignores him.

“From the start, everything you said about Daryl… the way you said it. You were just trying to get me to turn on him. I know he’s not a fucking saint, but neither are you--”

“Never pretended like I was,” he shrugs, looking away.

Michael talks over him. “-- and now you want something from me again. You want me to panic and take Luke away from here so you can give Order the go. Is that why you wanted Ashton out of here as well? Why you made him want to leave to go after Annika and Nathan?”

Jack crosses his arms, looking unimpressed and exhausted.

“Ashton wanted to go after them way before he came to me. I just told him that yes, it did seem weird that their communication was always cutting and that they were away for so long. Especially considering how Annika answers to Daryl with the same intensity as Caleb does. Excessive ass-kissing. I don’t think she’d just decide to not keep her fucking King informed. And hey, if it turns out that because of Anika and Nathan something bad happens to Luke, that’s on you.”

Michael chuckles, running his hands over his head.

“You’re fucking disgusting.”

Michael starts towards the door, and Jack calls out his name.

“So you’re just going to walk away? You’re not going to do anything about it? Millions of lives will be lost by your father’s hands and you won’t be bothered to, I don’t know, try to save them? How’s that for your hero complex? You’re just going to let them die? You’re going to let your _mother_ die?”

His hand stops at the doorknob, turns it and pushes so the door is properly open, and takes another deep breath. He looks over his shoulder, at Jack walking to him with a frown. Michael releases his breath and closes his eyes for just a split second.

He steps foot outside, and breathes out heavily.

“I’m starting to see the appeal in having you here. Easiest way to get you to shut up,” Michael forces a smile, and slams the door shut.

After that, he walks back home.

* * *

Michael doesn’t have any trouble breathing on his way back to the Big House, but he has trouble with just about everything else. Even walking in a straight line seems to be a problem. He feels as if he’s drunk, his head and shoulders too heavy, a sour taste in his mouth that won’t go away no matter how many times he swallows. It’s an all-around bad feeling of being lied to when someone speaks the truth. Because if anything, Jack never did lie, but the way he chose to speak the truth each and every time he did it proves Michael right in doubting him anyway.

His mind and body aren’t coordinated. He wants to sit down and cover his face in his hands and cry, but he keeps moving because he feels as if that’s the right thing to do. He wants to let his body and shake and wrap his arms around himself but instead he opens the entrance door that remains unlocked, and walks up the stairs. His heart is still pounding hard against his chest, and he isn’t sure whether that’s good -- because he’s still alive even after that messy confrontation that was this close to ending in a panic attack -- or bad -- because it’s beating so, so fast.

Michael doesn’t want to think about Opia, or Daryl’s plans for it. 

Michael doesn’t want to think about anything Jack said. He wants to forget Jack exists.

Tired and feeling emotionally drained, Michael stops in front of the door to his bedroom, his eyes going to Daryl’s door for a split second. All desire to either defend or confront him have vanished somehow along the way from Jack’s laboratory to the Big House, but there’s still a nagging feeling, like they have something to talk about.

But it’s late. And even if it wasn’t late, it still wouldn’t be the right time.

Because Michael left Luke sleeping, tucked under the blankets safe and sound, Michael opens the door without a second thought. What he sees makes everything stop, like the world itself slows down just so he has a chance to catch up.

Luke’s standing up close to the bed, until he isn’t anymore. 

There’s someone in front of Luke, only the woman isn’t standing as well. She’s floating, her body made of something that looks like vapor, molecules not linked together. She passes Luke and Luke’s head jerks back as he gasps for air. Her eyes, the only thing about her that Michael can focus on, roll back. They’re black. 

Michael holds his breath, body paralyzing, mind still slow.

She gives him one brief look, and then, as if deciding Michael isn’t worth it, she leaves.

It’s as if she leaves Luke’s body first. The second she’s done with him, his body falls back, boneless and too fast for Michael to catch. He still runs to Luke, though, his name coming out of Michael’s lips like a sad mantra as his heart picks up on the gravity of the situation. For a second, it looks like the woman’s eyes have turned white. Michael stares at her, kneeling down on the floor and pulling Luke’s unconscious body to his lap, where he can wrap his arms around.

His lips quiver, and the woman leaves through the crack in the broken window. 

That easily. Floating away.

“No, no, no,” Michael’s hands are shaking, but still he manages to touch Luke’s wrist. His pulse is alright, and when he pulls Luke even closer to him, he can hear his steady breathing. “Dad!” he yells, as loudly as he can. “Dad!” he yells again, and again, and again, until Daryl’s standing outside his door with wide eyes and a gun in his hands.

He falls to the floor next to Michael, checking Luke’s pulse, as if that wasn’t Michael’s first thought.

Michael doesn’t think about how he called Daryl.

He doesn’t think about waking up the whole house.

All he cares about are the hot tears on his cheeks that tell him that he left Luke alone with danger, and danger came after him in the form of a woman with no body, just piercing eyes that rolled black, until they looked white.

* * *

Halsey and Michael are pressed side-to-side in Michael’s bed, with Luke lying between Michael’s legs, his face pressed to Michael’s chest, eyes blinking slowly. He’s woken up just a few seconds ago, to Ashton and Caleb collaborating, which can be a strange sight to wake up to.

“Can’t be anyone with invisibility,” Caleb tells Ashton, voice just above a whisper. They’re standing by the window, and Michael’s stroking Luke’s overgrown blond hair, with his head on Halsey’s shoulder. Nobody noticed Luke’s opened his eyes yet. “I’m telling you. I can’t fucking fly.”

Ashton presses his lips together, touching the broken window with a sigh. “I’ve never seen any type of shape-shifting that happens like that, either. Never heard of anything like it in the city. I don’t think it’s Order.”

“And I’m saying it’s not Chaos,” Caleb says, matter-of-factly, but they don’t seem to be arguing. “So where does that leave us?”

Daryl comes into the room, and his eyes land on Luke.

“Luke,” Daryl says, slowly. “How are you feeling?”

Michael blinks a couple of times, looking from his father to his boyfriend, and then touches his shoulders to encourage him to look at him, and also to be in a better angle where he can look at Luke himself. Luke blinks at him slowly, and Michael feels his cheeks getting hot, his eyes burning a bit. “Thank the fuck,” he murmurs, and pulls Luke into an awkward hug, kissing his cheek and face and pressing him close.

Luke chuckles lowly, frowning, and putting some distance between them. “What’s going on?”

“You… the woman,” Michael starts, then frowns, looks at Halsey by his side for support.

It doesn’t come. She just looks at Daryl. Caleb’s looking at Daryl as well, but Ashton rushes to sit by Luke’s other side. “You don’t remember?” he asks.

Michael parts his lips, blinking a couple of times.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Luke forces a smile, looking unsure. He sits properly, Michael’s hug no longer necessary to keep him comfortable, and gives a look to everyone in the room. “Why’s everyone here?” he asks, voice thick and serious, like he wants them gone.

Michael frowns, shaking his head slowly.

“It happened to you too,” Daryl says, decidedly. “That day in my office. Halsey and Caleb were there. You passed out, didn’t know what I was talking about when I mentioned it, so I dropped it. But it appears it wasn’t just low blood-pressure after all,” he looks away from Michael, to Caleb.

Caleb presses his lips together, sighing.

“I passed out?” Luke asks, sounding more concerned this time, turning to Michael. Michael nods, feeling every bit as confused as he supposes Luke is. “That’s not possible, I was sleeping right here beside you,” Luke points at the bed, and then brings his hand to his head, looking away.

“Does it hurt?” Daryl asks. “Michael, is he hurt?”

Michael parts his lips. How is he supposed to know.

Halsey pushes him out of the way, and touches Luke’s chin, moving it to one side and then the other. “Not physically, it doesn’t seem like it,” she says, slowly, and then lets go with a little sigh, eyes still on Luke. “The woman Michael saw must’ve wiped his memory. Not sure how that happened, but I don’t think it was anything other than that.”

Luke’s eyes are wide, and they keep coming back to Michael, as if Michael could explain it.

He can’t. 

He’s seen her but he hasn’t.

The aggressor who invaded his and Luke’s head is still a ghost.

“Can you just,” Luke takes a deep breath, looking around, “do you mind if you give us some space? I’m sure you’re not doing any progress, because if you were, you’d be out there after whoever broke into this house. But I need to be with Michael right now.”

Michael feels something inside him break.

One by one, everyone leaves. Halsey hugs Luke and Ashton squeezes his shoulder and says that Luke better call if he needs anything. Daryl gives Michael one last reassuring look, and Caleb avoids eye-contact as much as possible, but they all leave.

And when it’s just the two of them, the image of Luke falling powerless to the floor comes back, and Michael bites back silly words that won’t mean anything, bites back the tears that stubbornly want to make an appearance again.

Luke sighs heavily, gently pushes Michael back until he’s lying, and lies next to him. In silence, he entangles himself to Michael in a way that makes Michael feel both safe and completely vulnerable. Michael still feels like crying, but not for the same reasons. He holds onto Luke, and Luke onto him.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Michael asks, quietly.

“No. I just want us to be safe,” Luke replies, and then snorts. “For a change.”

Michael remembers Jack’s words.

But he’s made up his mind against listening to him.


	30. mama, we all go to hell

Maddy rests her head on Michael’s shoulder and sighs softly. Michael wraps an arm around her with a quiet smile on his face, and keeps his eyes ahead.

This was before everything got more complicated. Before Michael kissed Calum, before Calum and Maddy started dating, before Michael started feeling more inclined towards anger than towards confusion.

Thinking back of it, he doesn’t know how old he is, but he’s old enough to know that, as Maddy and him watch Calum play football, they’re both at least a little in love with the boy.

It’s a charity event.

The Council members look pathetic without their business suits and their serious expressions. Michael doesn’t know what to make of Karen, chuckling lowly in a flirtatious way as she looks at councilwoman Nijak’s older brother. She’s wearing a top and a pair of jeans, and he’s wearing weird-looking shorts and an oversized shirt. Nijak’s closeby, her hair pulled up in a tight ponytail, sitting cross-legged as she watches the game of a few important people’s sons and daughters.

Maddy could very well be playing, but her mom, Jacqueline, is busy talking to other engineers, and Maddy never took much interests in playing sports if her mother wasn’t watching, or if she couldn’t play against Calum and Michael, just for the friendly rivalry. (Michael suspected it had more to do with teasing Calum, bumping her shoulder to his, raising her eyebrows in a way that dared him to make the next move, and just generally leaving Calum speechless with how good she was. He never said anything about that suspicion.)

“They look like clowns, don’t they,” Maddy says, out of nowhere.

But they’ve been friends for enough time that Michael knows she doesn’t mean Calum and some of their other classmates, people they know from equally pointless events like this one, put together mostly to promote the Council and their seconds in command as people who care for their people. He knows the people making Maddy sigh softly as she keeps following Calum with her eyes aren’t the ones playing. Or they are playing anyway, just a different game.

Michael licks his lips, searching for Karen with his eyes again, but this time he doesn’t find her.

“I think Mom’s having an affair with Nijak.”

Maddy pauses. “The council member Nijak? Lynda Nijak?”

“Nah, they’ve been friends since forever,” Michael says, letting go of Maddy, so she turns and looks at him. “I mean her brother. The older dude. I can’t find him, and I can’t find Mom either. So like, just putting two and two together.”

Nodding slowly, she keeps her brown eyes on Michael for another second. “Are you… okay with that? Or do you need to talk about it, or?” she lifts her shoulders. Michael shrugs back. He doesn’t know how to answer to that. Maddy nods, like she understands, and looks away again. “There’s _my_ mother,” she points at Jackeline in the distance.

Jacqueline looks exactly like all the other engineers. Michael thinks it’s a little creepy, how they all look the same, as if they were made in the same factory. Michael only knows two physicist engineers -- Jacqueline Harris, and Ian Lopez. The two together are probably the most relevant physicists in the country, but they like to keep a low profile. Michael always thought they were together, since Jacqueline’s husband and Lopez’s wife both died in the Magick War years ago, but he never asked Maddy about it, either. It’d be weird. They don’t talk about their parents all that much, except for Calum. But then again, Calum seems like he actually unabashedly _loves_ his parents, even when he’s mad at them, and the concept is freaky for both Michael and Maddy.

Jacqueline and Lopez mingle well with all the other engineers because they all have the same perpetually bored look on their faces, like they’ve seen better than they’re seeing now. Jacqueline has hair red like Maddy’s, and a freckled face, but on her it doesn’t look fierce, just bland. Michael would never say it -- he’d fear the comeback -- but he thinks bland is the only possible way to describe Jacqueline’s general lack of interest in all things. It’s shared by most engineers that work directly to the government, so Michael knows it’s probably a job requirement to lose all interest in everything in your life as the paychecks start coming higher. But it’s still infuriating to look at her, and then at Maddy, with the spark in her eye that never goes off.

Michael presses his lips together, looking away from the group of engineers and their pissing contests of who can be more disinterested in the others, and turns to Maddy. “Do you even know what this charity event is raising money for?”

“Magick War victims, I think,” she says, looking back at him, but she sounds as sure as Michael. “It was Nijak’s idea, or at least that’s what Mum told me anyway,” Maddy pauses, makes a face, still stuck in her mother and her group of co-workers, then finally looks away from them and back at Michael. She adjusts herself in her seat on the benches. “Lynda Nijak’s such a dick.”

Michael smiles.

“Why’s that, Mads?”

Calum never calls her Mads. Her name is Maddison, and Maddy is already a nickname, and Calum looks flustered enough when she calls him Cal. Mads is something that’s only Michael’s, and not because he wants her in the way he’s sure Calum does -- she gets him in a way that Calum doesn’t, even though she doesn’t know how secret. She has a tense relationship with her mother, even though it isn’t as bad as Michael’s, and she lost something to Chaos as well. Unlike Michael, not half of herself, but her father, too. Only it was different, of course. Maddy lost her father because he was killed. Michael lost his because he was born rotten.

Maddy pulls her legs up, sitting cross-legged, just like Nijak a couple of rows over. “She’s using all the pain that Chaos caused to raise money, and when she does, she’s going to look good in the Council. Then all her laws are going to pass. There’s no way to veto her if she goes public about it and makes a big deal. She’ll be people’s hero as soon as this day is over,” she raises her eyebrows, unimpressed.

“I don’t know,” he shifts uncomfortably, looking away from Maddy and to Nijak. She’s focused on the game, absolutely oblivious to the two teenagers talking about her and her political plans. “I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing, I mean. She’s nice, I guess?”

Maddy stares at him. “She’s nice, you guess?”

Her face is already breaking into a smile, and Michael rolls his eyes, looking embarrassed. “Shut up.”

“I mean,” she snorts, but it sounds in good-heart. “I know Karen has Lynda Nijak’s back. Everybody knows they never veto each other, it’s like Calum’s parents. But I don’t trust anyone in the Council. Not Calum’s parents, not Nijak, not Brown, not even your Mum,” she pauses, then, and gives Michael a concerned look. “No offense.”

Does _he_ trust anyone in the Council? He doesn’t think about it. They’re all boring adults with their boring laws and politics and pretending to like each other very dearly but probably talking shit to each other’s backs like they were Michael’s age. All he knows is they all treat Michael relatively nicely, so that makes them nice. Maddy probably thinks more about it because Jacqueline does too. Michael thinks it’s foolish to worry so much about things you have no control over.

It’s not like any of them can control the Council.

The Council controls everyone.

He smiles easily back at her. “None taken.”

“Goal!” someone yells close to them, and they both look.

It’s Calum. Of course it’s Calum, all made of poster boy posture and white teeth, smiling widely as he runs around the field and someone Michael doesn’t know but plays with Calum sometimes jumps on his back. They fall to the ground on their knees, yelling at the sky as if their game for charity is being broadcasted, but people all around them cheer loudly. Michael stands up first, Maddy follows him, and they both whistle.

Calum finds them in the benches, and that seems to be enough. No more looking for his parents or for Mali-koa, when he’s got his two best friends. He smiles at them, and they smile back at him.

* * *

“What are we going to do?” Ashton asks, raising his eyebrows at both Luke and Michael.

Michael can’t speak for Luke, but as for him, all he can do is stare at Ashton for a couple of seconds. Then he snorts, shaking his head, and takes a bite of his bread. It tastes good, or maybe it’s just that he’s lowered his expectations about food since he got to Death Valley. Either way, he enjoys his food and indignance while Luke takes a deep breath and, with a concerned frown, tells Ashton: “There isn’t much to do, Ash. Michael’s the only one who saw the woman from last night, and he doesn’t know her.”

Michael shrugs, as if to prove a point.

Ashton presses his lips, looking frustrated. Michael gets the frustration, but mostly he just wants to stop getting things for a while. Last night had been simply too much. Between Jack and the things he said, choosing which parts to believe and which parts to ignore, and then coming back to the Big House to find Luke with that woman… Michael thinks they all should just have a break.

From all of it. Relentless planning included.

They’re on the kitchen by themselves, just the three of them, but there’s this thickness in the air… Daryl’s out of the house, talking to Benji and the others Michael doesn’t know. They’re just names that Michael doesn’t want to put a face to. The obviousness to what they’re doing, scheming their way out as soon as Daryl has a talk with his new Head Champion, is obscene. Michael hates it, makes him feel twice as exhausted and three times as frustrated as Ashton looks. It makes him want to punch Daryl, because he remembers calling him Dad when he panicked, seeing Luke fall down, the thought that Luke could be dead making his heart stop.

He called Daryl _that_ , and then they never talked about it.

Michael sort of wishes he would mention it, even if to tease Michael, but Daryl’s not exactly the teasing type. It just makes everything all the more infuriating, and he’s done being so sad and furious. It’s draining.

He takes another bite of his bread, watching Ashton glare at them both, looking offended.

“Someone or something broke into this house, not once but twice. We always thought there was no place as safe as Death Valley. I couldn’t sleep after that… we’re not safe, guys. We have to decide on something to do, because our home isn’t safe anymore.”

Ashton looks like he truly believes that plotting during breakfast may make things right. Michael looks away from him, because if he keeps looking at Ashton, he’ll remember how these are thoughts that Jack put into his head, and it’ll make him mad again, and he’s trying not to be angry.

Luke sighs, resting his head on Michael’s shoulder.

“Nate and Annika will be back tonight. Doesn’t that make you feel safer?”

Ashton pauses, parting his lips.

It’s not what he expected to hear, it seems.

“I mean,” he frowns, “I… I don’t know. Something must’ve happened to them, right? Because… Because Annika wouldn’t go as long without checking in on Death Valley, calling Daryl, letting them know what was going on with their mission…” he pauses, eyes meeting Michael for the briefest of seconds. Michael’s scowling at him, because he’s heard that very same argument from somebody else’s mouth. “I’m just saying it’s odd. Does anyone even know what were they doing in the city?”

“You can ask them all about it when they come back today,” Michael replies.

Ashton frowns at Michael, like he doesn’t understand.

If he was there with Michael and Jack last night, maybe he would.

Luke gives Michael a funny look, apparently not understanding the snapping and the tone of voice either, but he doesn’t ask. Instead he looks at Michael’s bread, and without a word, steals the last piece from Michael’s hands. Michael tries snatching it away, but he isn’t fast enough, and Luke grins victoriously as scrumbles from the bread fall down his shirt in the hurry to fit it all in his mouth. Michael snorts, bites back the smile that threatens to make his face hurt, and Luke just cocks an eyebrow, very charmingly, but not fitting how he has to keep his mouth open to chew with how much of bread there is in there.

Ashton laughs quietly, but he still sounds concerned.

Michael ignores the concern, and focuses on his dorky boyfriend.

* * *

The four of them sit together, not because they all get along so great, but because they’re the youngest ones that are the children of the most important people, except for Mali-koa, who’s out of the city on a mission. Michael, Calum, and Eki Brown are all children of Council people, and Maddy is either Michael’s or Calum’s plus one, or maybe both. The first thing Eki tells them is that it’s ridiculous that they can bring their little friend -- Maddy rolls her eyes and drops her head back in an annoyed and loud sigh -- and she was still not allowed to bring her boyfriend. His name is Dylan, but that’s all she says when Calum asks about him, trying to be nice.

Eki doesn’t seem to put as much effort into making small talk as Calum does.

They’re seated right next to the table with the five Council members, and it should feel important or at least make Michael feel self-conscious, to be in the spotlight like this, sitting on a strangely tall stage while everyone else eats in tables distributed evenly around the room. It’s like watching them eat is some sort of attraction, only they’re absurdly uninterested in putting on a good show.

“Did you guys watch me play?” Calum asks Michael and Maddy, sitting between them in the round table, but he knows the answer already.

Both of them nod, and Maddy wrinkles her nose as if she’s smelling something foul. “It was horrifying to watch, really. Like a car crash. Couldn’t look away, no matter how bad that was.”

“Hey,” he laughs, bumping his shoulder to hers. Michael bites the insides of his mouth, but doesn’t roll his eyes, which is progress. “I scored three times. I was the striker of the game,” he tilts his chin up, smugly.

Eki snorts. “So fucking impressive.”

Maddy ignores her. “Eh,” she shrugs, still looking pretend-unimpressed.

For a second there, looking at the way Calum looks at her, with that vague smile on his lips, he thinks maybe Calum might kiss her right there. For the first time, sharing a table with Michael and Eki, in front of all of these people that every now and then snap pictures of the stage table. Michael looks away, even though he knows Calum _can’t_ do that, and looks at Eki for lack of better place to look at. She’s sighing softly, looking at the crowd, searching for someone. Her boyfriend, probably, but Michael doesn’t ask.

Instead he says: “Why didn’t they let you bring your boyfriend?”

It’s not a question out of concern. It’s boredom, which is different. Eki picks up on that.

Maybe it’s the only reason why she answers. “I’m already finishing school, but Dylan’s finishing the prep course to be an Order guard. I think Dad expected me to date someone who makes more money, but I don’t give a fuck what he expects me to do,” she shrugs, smiling.

Michael smiles back, a second of very vulnerable agreement in that table.

Calum and Maddy both look at Eki in a different light too, Michael can feel it in the way their eyes go to the girl a couple of years older than them, as if she’s made of the same as they are. All teenagers that are likely to turn on their parents in one way or another before they’re twenty. All children of very respected and well-known Order witches, and all so smothered by expectations that they’re going to burst.

Michael imagines what it’ll be like for each of them.

Michael’s burst will be being found out by the Order and killed on-spot for being half-Chaos and lying about it all his life. Maybe they’ll execute Karen first and make him watch, and he’ll regret being pissed at her for so long. Calum’s act of rebellion will be refusing to follow on his parents and Mali-koa’s footsteps, and become something unrelated to war. Michael can see it happening already; Calum becoming maybe a vet. Maddy will snap in a very public way, probably yelling and pointing fingers at Jacqueline in an event like this. They’ll probably both be very drunk, and Maddy will be arrested for disturbing the peace. And Eki’s a tough one, but he thinks maybe she’ll just continue to disappoint her father with her dating choices as a way of winning against them all, and rebelling every single second forever, marrying down and having children and bragging about things that will humiliate Councilman Brown, like living in a small village out of the city or adopting four children orphaned by War.

They’ll all be disappointments and that’s their bonding moment.

Michael smirks, looking at the other three people in this table, and feeling the weirdest sense of accomplishment, knowing that at least that makes them the same. Then something nags at his insides, and he remembers they’re not the same at all, because only one person in this table has Chaos blood, and then he looks away, clearing his throat awkwardly.

He looks at the table where the Council members talk in a polite quiet tone of voice.

Karen’s looking at him.

She sips her drink, and he tries to smile.

She gives him a pressed smile back.

He suspects that, in ways he can’t understand yet, he’s already disappointing her.

* * *

Sitting between Luke’s legs is nice. He’s trying to tell himself it’s not because he’s pathetically gone for him, and that it’s just a very comfortable place to be, but regardless, he’s still content there, head resting against Luke’s chest, receiving absentminded petting on his head like he’s the kitten Luke claims he is, as Luke and Halsey laugh at a joke Joel makes but Michael ultimately doesn’t get.

It’s about someone they all used to know, so everyone laughs except for Michael, but he doesn’t really mind. He’s comfortable and he feels _good_. They’re all outside of Joel’s house, that’s next to Benji’s. Nicole is training the people that are going on the mission with Daryl, Benji included. Michael tries not to think of the reason why Nicole and Benji aren’t there. He focuses instead on Tati very obviously also not getting the joke but laughing anyway to not feel left out.

They’re all sitting on the floor, and Joel’s drinking something that resembles wine but tastes nothing like it, and Luke takes the eventual sip, even if he makes a face right after. Halsey’s drinking as much as Joel is, sitting beside him with their backs against the wall, Luke and Michael on the opposite side. Tati’s on Joel’s lap, and sometimes on his back, effortlessly and swiftly.

Harry and Dennis were there for the first half hour, before Harry murmured something and Dennis shot Joel an apologetic look and led Harry back inside. If Michael had to guess, he’d say it has to do with Ashton not being there to spend time with him. If Michael also had to guess on that front, he’d say it’s because Ashton’s in Jack’s lab right now.

“Anyway,” Joel says, still smiling, and giving the bottle to Halsey. She takes a sip, and he looks back at Michael. “If you ever want a tattoo yourself, Michael, you just say the word. I can ink you, and it’d be a pleasure,” he smiles, charmingly. Michael smiles back immediately. “I did tell you about the fucking enormous wings I tattooed on Nate’s back, right?”

Michael nods, smiling. “But I wouldn’t tattoo wings.”

“He’d like to tattoo my name in an arrow heart,” Luke suggests, raising his eyebrows with a smug look on his face that makes Michael giggle when he tilts his head up to look at his boyfriend. Luke shrugs, like he can’t help that he’s a genius with such good ideas.

Luke leans down and presses a kiss to his mouth, and Michael laughs, shaking his head.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” Joel says, matter-of-factly, smiling big, in the same joking way. “I can get some sterilized needles from inside and we should get this started immediately.”

Michael nods. “Absolutely.”

No one moves, though. Joel cracks a smile, and then they’re all laughing. Halsey raises the bottle, and they all look like they’re celebrating something. Tati looks at the adults all confusedly, and Michael misses that he’s referring to himself in his head as an adult.

This is insane.

Joel’s brother is about to go die, and so is Michael’s father.

But they’re laughing together.

* * *

“What are you doing?”

Calum takes him by surprise, his voice gentle and a little small, but still too much of a disturbance to Michael’s silence. Or the closest it can get to silence in the bathroom of an enormous place full of people getting drunk in an extremely expensive fashion, for charity’s sake. Michael turns away from the window but doesn’t get up from the couch just in front of it, and he gives Calum a small smile.

He’s showered after the game, is in a black suit that looks expensive and just his size. Michael’s is a bit bigger and awkward, and he sort of hates it, his red hair looking out of place with the seriousness of the suit. But he accomplished to not mention anything about their fancy clothes during dinner, so he sure as hell isn’t mentioning it now.

“Hey,” Michael says instead of replying, and he points at the window, as if that explains it.

Calum doesn’t get it. He very rarely does. But he’s on Michael’s side anyway, figuratively and literally, walking to him and taking his side by the couch. “Everyone was asking about you,” he says, and by everyone he probably means either Maddy or Karen.

“I got distracted,” he says, and it’s only a half-lie to fit his half-one thing and half-another heart.

He really had gotten distracted, only he won’t share the reason. He was thinking about the money raised tonight, that regardless of Nijak’s intentions, is going to families that lost people in the Magick War. It makes him feel guilty that it happened, because half of him is part of the problem, part of the disease that killed Maddy’s father and Lopez’s wife and Eki Brown’s parents and little brother. So many people died in this war, and it makes him want to cry when he thinks about it.

Because half of him is Chaos. Because his father and his people were the ones attacking.

Michael presses his lips together, sighing heavily as he stares out the window again.

Calum touches his arm, and it anchors him back in reality, away from his head, the worst possible place to be right now. Michael gives him a little smile, thankful for the frown of concern, for the hand that lingers, for the confusion and the care.

“It’s alright,” he tells Calum, though it isn’t, and Calum doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Calum retrieves his hand. Michael wishes he hadn’t.

“So. Eki has a boyfriend. Crazy, right?”

“Yes,” Michael nods, smiling, “I don’t know what this Dylan guy has, but he must have a super big dick if Eki doesn’t hate him like she hates everyone else.”

Calum laughs, a big laugh that seems to fill the whole room and all the dark empty corners of Michael’s heart. He slaps Michael’s arm, conflicted between finding it hilarious and offensive, and says: “That’s ridiculous. First of all, I’m pretty sure that’s not a good enough reason to stay with anyone--”

“Well,” Michael shrugs.

Blushing, Calum shakes his head, laughing some more. “And second of all: _dude_. She’s scary, but she’s probably nice sometimes. And maybe this Dylan dude is just as cold-hearted and annoyingly sarcastic,” Calum says, raising his eyebrows, as if that’s a fair possibility.

Michael narrows his eyes. “I doubt it. He’s probably like a puppy. She’s an evil cat, so they’d be a good enough match,” he suggests.

Calum considers this.

They speculate about Eki Brown’s boyfriend for at least another twenty minutes before Michael stands up and decides it’s been enough time of hiding and they should get back to the party, and Calum loyally follows him out again.

There’s strategy to their methods.

Michael starts losing it, Calum anchors him back with anything that gets him talking.

It works.

It’s probably exhaustive for Calum, never knowing what is it on Michael’s head, but it works. For now, that’s all that matters to Michael.

* * *

Michael’s lying on Luke’s chest and his eyes are closed, but he isn’t even close to falling asleep. He’s paying attention to Luke’s heartbeats, his fingers tracing gently the patterns of the scars that cover Luke’s chest. Luke’s got an arm around him, and Michael feels at home.

“I called Daryl ‘Dad’ when I thought you died,” Michael says, quietly.

Luke moves his fingers slowly on Michael’s back, something between a caress and just mindless movement. Michael takes it either way. “It’s not a bad thing to care about him. He’s your family just as much as your mother is.”

“It kind of feels like I’m betraying her,” Michael frowns, opening his eyes. Luke’s heart answers to him immediately, talks over him, and he likes the sound of it, thinks it could lull him to sleep. “I feel guilty that I’m safe and she probably isn’t. Luke, I haven’t heard from her at all since I got arrested. The closest I got was that healer at the motel that one time. She said… that she was sorry. That she misses me. She knew I’d be arrested. She’s sorry, but she knew.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Luke says, then: “but she’s safe too, alright? Bad news travel fast. You’d know if something had happened to her. She probably found an ally that’s keeping her safe.”

Michael presses his lips together.

He’s been trying to convince himself he can stop himself from worrying. It was going so well until he remembered Karen and started feeling like crying again.

There’s a knock at their door. Michael takes a deep breath and sits up, saying, “I’ll get it.” He puts on a shirt that’s lying by the end of their bed, and with a yawn threatening to get out, he opens the door. It’s Daryl, frowning at his hair. Michael assumes his hair probably doesn’t look at its best after spending so much time in bed. “Um, hi.”

Daryl’s eyes go back to his eyes. “Hi,” he says. Daryl never really goes there unless Michael’s screaming for _Dad_ , so Michael thinks he knows what this is about before Daryl says it. It’s the evening anyway. “Nathan’s here. He wants everyone to be there for the dinner, and I think… I think that’s probably a good idea. You two have half hour to get ready and come downstairs.”

He looks disoriented.

The tiredness that had been sticking to him the last few days seems to have evolved into something more dangerous. He looks out of it, like he needs to be shaken. Michael wants to ask if he’s alright, but he isn’t sure he’d know how to deal with the answer.

Then, he doesn’t have to. Luke’s by his side, still shirtless and in his underwear, but Daryl doesn’t comment on it, and Luke seems to be too bothered by what he’s heard to worry about his clothing or lack thereof.

“Why just Nate? Where’s Annika?”

The way he asks, makes it clear Luke already has an idea.

The pause that comes from Daryl, the reticent way he parts his lips and looks away from Luke as he shakes his head with a frown, it’s all too much. Luke starts saying no, and Michael turns to him, sees Luke’s eyes tearing up and his expression closing off.

“No,” Luke says, this time more decidedly, and takes a few steps backwards. Daryl doesn’t correct him, and in that second that they lock eyes, Michael feels like he could stop them both from hurting each other, Daryl with the truth and Luke with the blaming. “No, she’s not dead, she can’t be dead,” Luke raises his eyebrows, snorting.

Again, Daryl says nothing.

Luke shakes his head vehemently, and then storms into the bathroom of the room, slamming the door shut in the process. Michael turns back to Daryl, sighing softly. “What happened?” he asks.

Daryl shrugs. “I didn’t understand. Nathan said Order caught Annika, but how could they? She’s the strongest witch I’ve ever seen… or was. Or was. I don’t know. Nathan says he’ll offer a toast to her during dinner, and tell everyone about what happened to her. I don’t--” Daryl shrugs.

He looks close to tears himself.

That was going to be his new Head Champion.

Fearless, bold, super-strong Annika. Who’s now dead.

“I’m sorry,” Michael says, taking a deep breath. Daryl nods slowly, as if he agrees but can’t make himself say anything. Michael looks over his shoulder, at the closed door of the bathroom. “I should probably… I should talk to him.”

“Yeah, go,” Daryl gestures dismissively, “I have to let everyone know Nathan’s here.”

Still looking lost, like he doesn’t recognize these walls and this house, Daryl leaves. Michael watches him go, feeling the mourning get to him even though he never met Annika. And then he goes to the bathroom, back to his boyfriend, who did know her, and was counting on her to live.

* * *

He’s in the car, but the partition is up, so in a way, it’s really just Michael and Karen, the driver in a completely different world. He’s glued to the window, attracted to the moon and all the self-destructive thoughts that come with it. He’s thinking of Chaos and Order and the fact that very soon Calum and Maddy will find out that they’re falling in love with each other, and any chance he might have had with Calum will slip away forever.

Karen takes a deep breath, setting her purse away. After the game, she changed into a fancy green dress that looks beautiful on her. Her hair is pulled up in a loose bun, and her make-up makes her look younger and prettier than Michael’s ever seen her. She always looks at her best in the parties that follow the events, and Michael’s always surprised, no matter how many times they go to these things.

She puts a hand on his arm, and instead of relaxing like he had with Calum, he flinches.

She retrieves her hand, frowning. “What is it, baby?”

Michael sighs, looking away from the moon and down at his thighs. “I’m just so tired of hiding.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while, so he looks at her. Her expression has hardened, and she doesn’t look as jovial as she had a second ago. She definitely looks nothing like the woman flirting with Lynda Nijak’s brother during the football game.

“Michael,” she says, as if that puts an end to it.

He’d argue, but the bravado has fallen and all that’s left is the little kid who’s scared and sad all the time. So instead of yelling or gritting his teeth like he sometimes does about this, he takes a deep breath and tells her: “Part of me is what everyone in that party today hates so much. This whole charity event was to raise money because part of me is the disease that kills everyone.”

He hasn’t realized he was tearing up until he feels his cheeks burn hot with the tears.

Karen’s expression softens, and she presses her lips into a thin line. She comes closer, brings him to her, hugs him without his even acknowledgment; he just takes a deep breath and tries to stay still, while she runs her fingers over his head, kisses his forehead, whispers that it’s going to be alright, and that she loves him so, so very much.

* * *

Luke and Michael are holding hands as they walk down the stairs, the chattering loud enough that it feels strange and alien, like walking into an alternate dimension. Michael squeezes Luke’s hand, and Luke gives him a little smile, but Luke’s mind is probably still on Annika’s death, while Michael’s is consistently stuck on how he’s running out of time with Daryl.

The living room that was up to then completely ignored looks all different. A longer table than the one that’s in the kitchen was moved to the center of the room, and the lights look brighter; there are long benches for people to sit, and there’s more people than Michael thought there’d be.

The first person he sees is Benji, talking to Joel and Nicole. Tati is in her arms, and the four of them seem to be in their little bubble. Michael can’t get past that, the look of uneasiness in Benji’s eyes, and how Joel and Nicole seem to be putting on a show to pretend like it’s not there.

Michael assumes Benji being here is the reason why Cameron isn’t.

Dennis and Harry are both sitting on the benches, and to Harry’s other side is Ashton. He’s smiling at Harry as Harry tells him something with great enthusiasm. Michael doesn’t think Ashton knows about Annika yet, or maybe he’s just trying harder to be there for Harry.

Caleb and Jason are talking on the other side of the room. Jason’s doing that thing where he smiles he most dimpled smile, and it seems to distract Caleb for about three seconds before he’s looking over his shoulder. He doesn’t look at Michael and Luke at the end of the stairs, but at Halsey, near the door, staring ahead. She looks pale, like she might as well have seen a ghost. She looks equal parts terrified and shocked.

Michael follows her eyes and finds Daryl talking to a man. Nathan.

He’s taller than Michael thought he’d be; bigger, even, like he’s made of a something different than the rest of them. He’s wearing a nice button-down shirt that looks a size too small, and has a mean smirk that doesn’t seem to fit very well his expressionless face. He’s listening to Daryl, or at least Michael thinks he is. He’s nodding slowly but his eyes are vacant, focusing past Daryl and back on Halsey. There’s a tiny little moment there, where Michael wishes this man was dead and Annika was alive instead, even if Daryl was concerned for Halsey’s safety because of Annika, not Nathan.

Michael frowns, eyes still on Nathan, and whispers to Luke: “Is that him?”

Luke nods, releasing his breath slowly. “That’s Nate. I need to say hi. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” he raises his eyebrows, questioningly. Michael presses his lips together; he really, really doesn’t want to say hello to the man that looks like his soul was drained from his body. Luke seems to catch that, chuckling lowly and nodding. “Alright. I’ll talk to you in a minute, okay?” he says.

He looks and sounds better than he was about forty minutes ago, when he was crying on the bathroom floor, hugging his knees and saying between sobs that one by one, they all end up dying. Michael hadn’t known what to do, then. He just sat with him and hugged him and kissed his face, and hoped the bad thoughts would go away.

Unfortunately, he knows that he can’t love him so much those thoughts disappear.

It’s not up to him.

Luke presses his lips to Michael’s and then he’s off to talk to Nathan. Michael hangs back, watches as Luke waits so Daryl’s done with whatever he’s saying, and then gives Luke a reassuring look, before leaving them alone. Nathan turns to find Luke there, standing with his arms spread, like he expects nothing less than a hug.

Nathan frowns at him, a split second looking confused to the point of disgust.

And then he cracks another smirk, and hugs Luke.

As tall as Luke is, Nathan is still much bigger. Luke disappears in Nathan’s arms.

“I hate the way he’s been looking at me,” Halsey says, stopping by his side. Michael doesn’t have to look to know it’s her, doesn’t have to even move. He accepts the proximity, how she sighs reluctantly, and only raises his eyebrows, nodding slowly, because yeah, he’d seen that too. “I don’t know what’s up with him. Think he blames me for Annika’s death?”

She turns to him, and her eyes are magnets that attract his. He parts his lips, frowning, ready to say that no, of course not, but then he remembers he doesn’t actually know. “Why would he?”

“I have no idea, but it’s the only reason I can think for… for those looks,” she presses her lips together, lifting her shoulders. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I was so relieved he was alive, even if Annika wasn’t. I was never close to neither, just like I’ve never been close to Caleb, but we’re all Champions here. We’re a family. A problematic family that will very likely destroy itself from within, but we’re a family anyway.”

Michael turns away from Nathan and Luke and their chatting that he can’t listen, and tells Halsey: “He didn’t want to hug Luke. I don’t know if Luke saw it, but it was weird. Do you think it has something to do with his partner dying on him?”

“He hasn’t breathed a word about it yet,” she pauses, puts a stray of blue hair behind her ear. “I heard Daryl talking to Caleb, saying that he could leave me here while he asked more people to come here. Nathan wants everyone to pay his respects to Annika. I don’t know what he’s up to.”

The frown back on his face, Michael looks around.

Geordie is talking to Diana, the human whose mother was the leader of the village and dead in the massacre. They’re sitting on the other end of the same bench as Harry, Ashton and Dennis, but they’re not close at all. There are already so many people in this house, people Michael’s never seen before. And with the exception of Cameron and, of course, Jack, everyone he’s met in Death Valley is here, even Geordie’s parents, engrossed in conversation near the table.

“Yeah, I’ve heard Caleb is watching you tonight. But without Annika, there’s no way anyone’s going to try anything against you, so what’s the point?”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s not about-- nobody would try and attack me anyway. Daryl just thinks I’ll be depressed to hear him choose another Head Champion,” she pauses, looking away, searching the room for Daryl. Michael does, too, on impulse, and they both watch the man for a second, talking to a man with a child in his arms. “He may be partially right.”

Michael sighs softly, touching her arm, in what he hopes is a reassuring manner. “Is this difficult for you? I mean. Of course it’s difficult. I shouldn’t have asked.”

She cracks a smile. “It’s alright.”

But it isn’t.

Michael can tell it isn’t.

Time seems to drag from then on. Michael watches Caleb leave Jason and go ask whoever’s missing to join them, Jason going to sit with Geordie and Diana, Luke coming back and Nathan avoiding everyone’s eyes. It’s strange, and stranger still is the nag that he feels, pulling him towards his Order magick. He knows what is it, just like he knows what it feels like when his Chaos needs to come out. But this isn’t the place to roll his eyes back and listen. Too many heartbeats pulsating, too many breaths, too much to listen to and feel all around him. Plus, it would probably freak them out -- the Prince boy rolling his eyes in black and white stars, feeling for everyone’s feelings, breathing into their lungs, tasting with their tongues.

It’s not the place or time, so he turns to Luke with a half-smile, and says: “So Daryl’s finally serving the good food tonight, right?”

Luke smiles back, nodding. “Supposedly.”

It takes Caleb around twenty minutes to come back with four people. Luke points at them, and says all the names that Michael had heard from Cameron’s lips: Matt, Jeremiah, Billy, Nancy. All people who are going on Daryl’s mission with Benji as well. The old Champions. Most of them are covered in tattoos and have hard looks, smile pressed smiles to everyone around.

Michael locks eyes with the woman, Nancy, and for one second, he feels what it used to feel like: his Order magick coming back to him effortlessly, without him needing to roll his eyes back. He feels her confusion in his veins, feels his eyes burning with the way she looks at Nathan like she has no idea. She really has no idea, Michael realizes. None of them do. They don’t know why they’re there. Most of the people here don’t.

Michael turns to Daryl.

He closes his eyes.

Daryl’s nervous. The confusion expands to him.

What the fuck is Nathan up to?

Michael opens his eyes, parting his lips; he wants to ask Halsey what’s her take on this, but Caleb’s giving her an annoyed look, saying, “Let’s take a walk and let the grown-ups talk,” and she’s rolling her eyes, flipping him off, but leaving anyway.

“No, wait,” Michael says, but more to himself than her. He watches as Caleb points towards the door, and waits for her to go first; not as an act of gentleness, but to make sure she really is leaving.

Luke bumps his shoulder to Michael’s, with a weird combination of frown and smile on his face. “What’s wrong, Mikey?”

He doesn’t know. But something is.

Tati yells, “Luke!” and Nicole sighs, excusing herself and walking to them with the girl in her arms. She lets her down only so Tati can climb up Luke’s legs. She has a cup of something in her hands, and manages to not spill it on her way up to Luke’s arms. Luke smiles softly, and Nicole gives them both a greeting smile.

Nicole’s still standing in front of Michael, Luke talking to Tati in his arms, when Michael sees Nathan approach from over Nicole’s shoulder. It must show too much, because Nicole looks over her shoulder, and between gritted teeth, she tells Michael: “Apparently someone wants to meet you.”

Michael tries to smile at the man to see if that’s the closest they’ll get, but he’s still coming closer to him. “I don’t want to meet him,” he says, defensively, and Nicole gives him a funny look.

In the mess of people and bright lights, Daryl finds Nathan.

The look of annoyance on Nathan’s eyes is startling. Everything about this is. Michael has no idea why all the other Champions were so willing to go save this guy from whatever dangers the Order was offering him and Annika. Even looking at him already makes Michael feel sick in his stomach.

Nathan turns around to talk to Michael.

The shirt is a size too small, but the collar is loose. Michael frowns, staring at the knuckles of his spine. He counts them with a frown, as Nicole asks Luke something that he answers with a laugh.

Nathan gets rid of Daryl, giving him a pressed smile and walking towards Michael again.

Michael shifts his weight to the other foot, and waits for the inevitable encounter.

“Michael,” he says, his voice thick with something, though Michael can’t quite say what is it. It sounds an awful lot like pride, like he’s just accomplished something big. Michael can’t make himself smile, even as the man flashes him a grin. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

To their side, Tati giggles loudly.

Luke’s tickling her, Michael catches that much with the corner of his eye. And then so does Nathan, because in trying to escape Luke’s arms, she jumps away from him, and her drink finally spills. Most of it lands on the floor, but some of the liquid splashes against Nathan’s back.

Michael bites back a smile.

“Oops! Sorry, sorry, sorry!” she tries, and Nathan slowly turns away with a scowl on his face.

Nicole takes Tati from the floor, an apologetic look already on her face.

“It was my fault, really, so I’m the one who’s sorry. I should be paying more attention,” Luke says.

Michael’s not paying attention to what they’re saying.

Nathan’s turned away from him, and there’s something he can see clearly now. There’s a tattoo peeking from the collar of his shirt. Now that the side is wet with the juice Tati spilled, it clings to the skin, and Michael can see it better: a dragon.

And he remembers.

He remembers Joel bragging about tattooing wings to Nathan’s back, and how it took forever because Nathan had such a low tolerance to pain. And then he also remembers what Benji had said: _not even shapeshifters can take your ink if they take your face._

Michael remembers, and he can’t breathe.

He takes a step back, his body stumbling on someone passing him. A woman with white dyed hair and a frown on her face, but as soon as she sees it’s Michael, the Chaos prince, she gives him a little smile. Michael doesn’t smile back. Michael’s staring at Nathan’s back and trying to come up with a plan, but the oxygen doesn’t seem to reach his lungs or brain.

There are so many people in here.

“He’s not,” he tries, his voice weak, cracking, and then he clears his throat, tries speaking louder: “Dad?” he asks, panic building in his throat. Daryl’s by the window, talking to one of the men who used to be a Champion. Michael doesn’t know if it’s Billy or Jeremiah, but one of them. He doesn’t hear Michael, of course. And he doesn’t have time to think, or time to breathe. He feels the tears filling his eyes and his throat closing. “He’s not,” he tries again, shaking his head vehemently.

Not-Nathan turns to look back at him. He’s smiling.

He moves closer to hug him, and Tati’s running away again, both Nicole and Luke running after her before she spills more drinks. Michael’s alone with not-Nathan. And not-Nathan’s smirking up at him, spreading his arms again for a hug, and Michael wants to throw up.

He takes another step back, but not-Nathan takes another forward, and before Michael knows it, he’s paralyzed and wide-eyed, with not-Nathan’s arms around him.

“You’re not Nate,” he manages to say.

And not-Nathan doesn’t seem surprised that he’s figured it out. Close to his ear, he says: “Karen thinks you’re Daryl’s prisoner. She’d be very disappointed to find out that you’re here by choice. But still, this changes nothing.”

He slaps something to Michael’s neck.

It stings, and he frowns, regaining enough control to get away from not-Nathan’s arms. Something thick closes around him, like when Luke gave him the cloak, but it’s different. Michael watches as not-Nathan casually unbuttons his shirt. There’s an explosive attached to his chest, the type Michael used to see movies about. Order explosives, thin and expensive, almost like a belt.

His breathing becomes even more erratic.

He’s crying now, and someone screams.

It’s very fast, but he manages to yell: “He’s Order! Run!”

Other than that, he can’t look away from not-Nathan. From the man Karen sent.

She’d threatened to find Death Valley and blow it up to pieces if Daryl took Michael from her. Now she’s putting her money where her mouth was.

It happens both too fast and too slow.

Michael wishes he could look around, because he hears the screaming and people running, in the few seconds it takes for not-Nathan to lock eyes with Michael and press a button on his chest. And then it’s just too much, the man glowing and exploding right in front of Michael’s eyes.

The first thing is the noise.

It’s the loudest thing Michael’s ever heard, and it hurts his ears so much that he feels as if something explodes inside of his right ear. Something ricochets against him, and he yells in pain as his body collapses against the nearest wall.

His chest goes up and down, up and down, up and down.

He’s still breathing, but it doesn’t feel like it.

He shuts his eyes, because the light of the explosion is too bright, and he tries screaming, but he’s too shocked and terrified to allow his mouth to stay open. He feels the blood licking down his neck, and realizes the world has gone silent. All he hears is the vibration of something, but he thinks that comes from within. The world is mute and quiet in times of terrorism. Nothing to hear, nothing to see, just his shaking body protected with a shield, courtesy of Order technology, while all around him everyone dies.

The world is fading away, and being thrown against the wall doesn’t make his bones ache as they would without the shield, so he hates his bones all the more for not giving in when everyone else’s is. He tries opening his eyes, but there’s only fire and death.

Not-Nathan managed to accomplish what Scarlet hoped to do but couldn’t: he set fire to the Big House. He brought it all down. He destroyed it.

To his side, the woman that passed him before and smiled, the one with the white dyed hair, is dead. Her eyes are wide open and there’s so much blood Michael can’t tell where her body ends and where the debris starts.

Everything is debris and everything is death.

There’s no sound at all but still something vibrates inside him, slowing down by the second.

The world is falling apart and fading out at the same time, and he can’t keep his eyes open.

His head lolls to the side, against the floor, and in the middle of the flames, his eyes close.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't believe we're at 30 chapters and 200k words! this is amazing. thank you guys so much for everything you've done these past months. i appreciate every kudo, every comment, and every reader so much. it feels truly amazing to know that i have this enormous support net with so many cool people having my back. to me, posting what i joke is a "season finale" chapter right in the beginning of 2016, is massive. i believe this year is going to be super awesome, for me and for you. hopefully it's an all-around good sign, and it means we'll have lots of exciting things coming up. i know i'm very excited to let you know all the things that are coming up on opia. i'll take a small break to finish my other muke fic, [the moment the lights go out](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5419490/chapters/12521909), and maybe finish a one-shot in the endless list of wips i have. knowing me and how i can't stay away from this story, this "break" will probably be like a week, if so much, but alas, i thought it'd be symbolic too, a short break to go with the "season finale" chapter.
> 
> either way, yay!!!!! a milestone!!!!! please let me know your thoughts, and i hope you enjoyed the chapter lots!!! ❤❤❤


	31. don’t try to sleep through the end of the world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so my plan to stay away from opia didn't work so well ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ hope you enjoy it, beautiful!!!~ HAPPY READING!! *w*

It’s a faraway buzz.

Michael hears it faintly, and feels himself walking towards it, even though he isn’t moving. The buzz is magnetic and he is the other side of the magnet, being pulled towards it like there’s something to find there. There is, in a way, consciousness he supposes, and he doesn’t want that. 

His first thought is that the buzz is calling him back, and the second is that he’d rather not go.

Slowly, like he’s being dragged out of water, he comes to his senses. 

Choosing to open his eyes last, the first thing he feels is the acute pain on the right side of his head. The pain is so sharp that it barely feels like anything other than burning. He frowns and tries to move to the other side, but the lightest of breezes makes him want to cover the shell of his ear and his exposed neck. He curls into a ball on the place where he’s lying, reaching to touch.

It’s not a good idea. 

His fingers graze against his neck, and he winces quietly, tensing his stomach to bring his knees closer to his chest. He feels stitches against the pads of his fingers, and it makes him hold his breath, his hand shaking a little. He finally opens his eyes, to find out he isn’t in his bedroom. The lights are all out, but the room is a lot smaller, and he’s on a bed. That’s good enough for now.

He tries sitting up, his hands letting go of his stitched up neck, but his balance is weirdly off, and he brings his hand to his forehead, frowning intensely as he feels the ground around him break. 

The buzz is still there. Soft buzzing that doesn’t give him a headache, but gives him questions.

He touches his right ear, the one that hurts. He starts at his earlobe, his fingertips shaking more by the second. There’s a lump in his throat, and he isn’t ready to deal with the outcome, not when his fingers start tracing up over the cartilage, and he feels the cut.

It was either the blast or pieces of things ricocheting against him. 

The upper part of his ear was cut.

His bottom lip quivers, and he takes a deep, deep breath in.

He looks around the room, and at first he thinks he’s completely alone. 

Then he looks over the armchair near the window, and the light that comes is just enough that he makes the person’s profile, sleeping on his side, with his face pressed against the backrest, and a blanket pulled to his shoulders but threatening to fall down. With the very dim light, there’s no way Michael can tell how hurt he is, but at least from the distance it looks like all his limbs are in place.

And he’s alive. That means something. That makes Michael breathe out in relief.

Daryl’s alive.

Michael closes his eyes for a moment, trying to tell himself that this is as okay as it gets; he rubs his eyes to rub sleepiness away, and tries to force himself to stand up. His legs are weak and so is his body, though, and he can’t really keep his balance; his head is dizzy and he feels something bitter crawl up his throat. He curses in what seems like a whisper that echoes in his head and in the room, and then falls back on the bed, seated and lost.

Daryl hears his attempt, though, and moves in his direction with startled sleepy eyes.

“Thank God,” Daryl says quietly, or at least that’s what Michael thinks he says, and then he’s setting the blanket aside and coming his way. 

Michael frowns. He wouldn’t say God has much to do with any of what had happened.

His eyes are trained on his father, and when Daryl hesitantly sits on the other side of the bed, Michael can see, even in the dark, that his face and as much as he can see of his neck are hurt. Michael can’t tell exactly how much of his skin was burned and how much was cut, but then again, the lights are still off. He presses his lips together, looking at Daryl, watching the small smile appear on his lips, how his lips try to shape into a smile but the deformity of the wounds don’t quite let it happen. Michael feels as if the whole world has stopped.

Looking away from him, Michael brings his hand to his right ear again, touching lightly the cut. It stings, but more than that, he isn’t stupid. He clears his throat, and says, slowly and cautiously, as if the words are what make it real: “I think I can’t hear from this ear anymore.” True to his words, the sounds come to him unbalanced; it’s like being alone in a gymnasium and screaming at the top of his lungs. It echoes but in a weird way. It echoes but on only one side. Michael presses his lips together a second time, a longer pause between them, his eyes focused on the floor, and then he tries, a little loudly: “I can’t hear well. Here,” he touches his right earlobe, fingers shaking slightly, “nothing. On the other side, I can, but,” he lets go of his ear, taking another deep breath. “It’s different. Lower, quieter. And it buzzes all the time.”

None of them say anything for what feels like a long, long moment. Michael thinks maybe he needs it, to not say anything, just so he can be sure the silence doesn’t come from within, that it isn’t his body denying him to hear all the chaos around. It’s silent because Michael says nothing, trying to swallow the lump in his throat as if he possibly could, and Daryl choosing his words, opening and closing his mouth a few times, frowning and trying. He is trying.

“Do you want me to sit on the other side, so you can hear me better?” he asks.

Michael turns to him with a surprised look on his face. He snorts, and then something weird happens with his face, the corners of his mouth going up, even though his eyes are filling with tears. He doesn’t know how come this is what pushes him over the edge; a small act of kindness from his murderer father, who he grew to hate and fear over the years, only to later call him Dad in times of panic. Michael shakes his head timidly, trying to bite back the smile as well as the tears, and instead pulls his legs up again, so he can sit cross-legged in front of Daryl, his good ear closer to his father. 

Daryl takes a deep breath, and he must see that Michael’s struggling with the tears, because he says: “I’m sorry about the stitches. I’m not very good with those, as you could probably tell already. You’ll probably have a big scar there,” raising his hand to point at the side of Michael’s neck. The way he says it, it’s like he just needs to have something to say, but it doesn’t help to distract Michael of the new body he’s in.

It doesn’t do anything to help him fight the tears in his eyes, either. 

It isn’t even that he’s sad, not yet, because reality hasn’t caught up to him. He just thinks of the stitches and how Daryl must’ve been when he was sewing his skin back together, and he doesn’t think he minds the scar that will be there, even if now it hurts just to think of the spot. 

Michael takes a deep breath. “Did you do Luke’s stitches too? The ones in his chest?”

Daryl parts his lips, looking a little dazed. He blinks a couple of times, but nods.

In response, Michael smiles quietly, looking away. “The scars aren’t the bad part. The bad part is what made the wounds happen. Scars are just proof that you’re still alive,” he says, and Daryl takes a deep, deep breath, like he’s running the words in his own tongue too, to memorize them for later, for forever. Michael thinks he should, too. “So I was bleeding that bad, huh,” he raises his eyebrows. 

He’s not sure he wants to know. But he thinks he has to.

Daryl nods, but looks away when Michael looks at him, as if he can’t do this, but will for Michael’s sake anyway. It takes him a couple of seconds to recompose himself, but his voice comes out choked up. “I was with Jeremiah near the window. He managed to teleport us out of the room, but he can’t do it very far. His magick is for repositioning himself in fights and surprising the enemy, not for rescues,” he says, meeting Michael’s eyes briefly, as if he’s trying to explain how come he didn’t save everyone in the whole room with somebody else’s magick. Michael doesn’t say anything. “We weren’t hit by the explosion as much as by the glass and the fire. But we were still conscious. When I found you, there was a pool of blood around your head. It wasn’t pretty,” he pauses, clears his throat. Michael unconsciously brings both of his hands to his neck, hovering over the stitches, the open wound that could’ve killed him. “Neck is… neck is complicated,” Daryl says. Michael snorts, because there is that word again, never leaving Daryl’s most basic vocabulary. “I’d stopped the bleeding by the time I had the stitches, but my hands wouldn’t stop shaking,” he looks down at them, spread over his lap, and so does Michael. “I was afraid I’d end up hurting you more. But if I didn’t stitch you up, the bleeding would come back, and then I’d lose you. I had to risk it.”

“I’m alive. You did it,” Michael says, reaching for him, hand touching his knee firmly.

Daryl doesn’t seem to have felt the touch, supposed to be reassuring, at all. “I’m lousy at these things,” he shakes his head, eyes on the floor. “But I couldn’t have just left you to die. Anne Irwin is the only nurse any of us know, but it would take days for her to get here, and you were convulsing already…” he shakes his head. Michael thinks he’s crying.

The words are hard to hear, even through the tunnel they seem to go through before they reach Michael’s head. Michael blinks a couple of times, trying to stop the distracting buzzing, and retreats his hand. 

He doesn’t know what to do with Daryl’s tears. 

If Daryl’s falling apart, it doesn’t look too good for him.

“I think Ashton’s sort of good with that, because of his Mom,” Michael says, with a frown, trying to take the conversation elsewhere. But Daryl just gives him a look, and it’s not one that’s difficult to read. Michael remembers then, that this wasn’t an attack _against him_ ; that he was the only one protected with a shield when the house blew up. He remembers all the people that were inside, and the dead stranger next to him when he fell unconscious. Michael shakes his head, covering his mouth, and says, “No,” and then again, and again, and again. “No, no, no. Not Ashton.”

But Daryl doesn’t correct him, just meets his eyes with an apologetic look.

“He can’t be dead,” Michael snorts, insisting on shaking his head, even though it makes him feel even dizzier. His voice comes out strangled and far away when he says: “Ashton’s not dead.” But even then, he doesn’t sound like he believes it. He sounds like he’s lying to himself. And Daryl must see it, because he looks down, and searches for Michael’s hands.

It’s every bit of awkward as it was the last time Michael reached for his hands, in what feels like a lifetime ago. Michael feels the warmth on his hands but doesn’t hold his father’s hands in return, too shocked. His eyes start burning along with his nostrils, trying to hold back tears, feeling a wave of both sickness and something worse: tragedy.

He stands up, yanking his hands from Daryl’s, and he has to hold the headboard of the bed to do so, but he can’t deal with sitting still any longer. He takes deep breaths, and tries to stop himself from shaking his head, but the denial is hitting too strong. Ashton’s his friend. Ashton’s infuriating for keeping the secret that he took Opia from Michael, just like all of them did, and Michael still hasn’t forgiven Ashton for not spending every free second with Harry. But he’s still his friend. He’s his friend, and his friends can’t die.

Nobody he cares about is allowed to die. Not even faceless strangers are allowed to die, because it’s his fault. Because not-Nathan was only there because Karen thought Daryl was keeping Michael there against his will. Because Michael didn’t try to reach out for her, not really. Because his mother probably wasn’t even sure he was still alive, and that makes someone desperate.

She was desperate, and now he is.

He drops his head back, and it hits the wall behind him. The tears start rolling down his cheeks and it burns his skin. The angle is bad for his neck, and the buzzing grows louder, starting in his ear and spreading somehow to all of his body. He vibrates in buzzing now. He’s slipping away.

And then it gets to him, and he turns to Daryl, still sitting on his new bed in the dark small room that isn’t his. His father with his head between his shoulders, burned and cut, and ultimately broken. And the question is hard to say, and Michael thinks his rebellious ear decides to not let himself register the sound of it, but still his mouth moves to ask the question:

“Why’s Luke not here with me?”

Daryl pauses.

His body aches like it’s expected to ache, and there’s a throbbing on the right side of his head, which is also expected. His neck burns with every breath, and his lungs feel compressed. And it’s all very, very expected. He’s one of the survivors of an explosion. He had an Order shield around his body, the type really only Council members use because it’s so expensive, and that had saved him. It was stopping him from getting too hurt, and in the process, allowing everyone else to get hurt beyond repair.

Repair stands for stitches, for scars, for burn marks and for deafness. Lost limbs, lost sight, whatever may come from an attack as bad as that one.

Beyond repair is only death.

“Where’s Luke,” Michael deadpans, because his heartbeat is picking up on his nerves, and he has to force himself to keep breathing as steadily as he can, because Daryl won’t know how to get himself out of an anxiety attack, and Michael isn’t sure he can pull himself out of one either.

Shifting uncomfortably on his place at the end of Michael’s bed, Daryl gives the floor a long look, raising his eyebrows. Michael can identify every micro-expression in his face even in the dark, so he stops watching, frowns and looks away, feeling his eyes and nostrils burn harder, but keeps his eyes on the opposite wall. In his head, just a mantra: breathe, breathe, breathe.

Slowly, so slowly the whole world might as well be collapsing around them, Daryl tells him: “He didn’t make it, son.”

Michael keeps staring at the floor, because the floor doesn’t tell him lies.

His lips sink on his bottom lip so hard that almost as immediately as they touch the lip, it starts bleeding. It must’ve been chapped, already chewed on during the hours that Michael spent unconscious, rolling from side to side, or trying to regain consciousness while his neck was being stitched up. All he knows is he tastes blood, and then, with his eyes burning, he tastes bile. It’s a sickening feeling that could very easily knock him off his feet, which is ridiculous, because he doesn’t even believe what Daryl said.

Snorting loudly, he shakes his head. 

“You’re lying,” he says, but the buzzing grows louder.

And then it’s a lot of things, and nothing special at the same time. The buzzing reverberates through him, but it’s louder in his head. The sound becomes sharp and metallic, and though he knows it’s still in his head, it hurts so much he feels like screaming. Maybe he does. He stops listening to his own voice, and to the world around him. The noise is louder than the world, and bigger and stronger than him. It engulfs him and swallows him whole, and once he’s swallowed, there’s nothing left of him.

With the palms of his hands pressed hard against his ears and his eyes screwed shut, he feels himself sliding down the wall, ready to fall seated. Somehow Daryl’s there when he does fall, touching his shoulders, knelt in front of him, his mouth moving and his eyes wide, but Michael can barely make the images with the blurry lenses of tears that fog his vision.

His lips quiver. His hands are shaking.

He shakes his head some more, and this time, though the buzzing is still louder than his voice, he thinks he screams when he tries saying: “You’re lying! He’s not dead!”

Then Michael realizes, that though his head hurts and his right hand, the one that had been pressed to his ear, is now slick with his own blood, that he isn’t crying so hard his whole body shakes because he’s sad. It’s because he’s angry. He’s furious that Daryl would say something like that. Luke could make it through anything. Luke had his chest opened up for scientists to look for a drug that all the time had been there but they couldn’t find, because his body had just associated it and melted it back into his bloodstream in a way that nobody could see it. Luke was rescued and brought back to the city that he loved. Luke made it through a skyscraper fall with a maniac smile on his lips with a telekinetic friend to catch him. Luke made it through Michael’s bad moods and distrust, those nights at room 93 when Michael was still deciding whether he was allowed to let himself be interested in Luke’s neon tricks with the lip ring. Order found them out, and still Luke made it, being shot repeatedly to protect someone, and being healed by someone unwilling. Luke made it through kisses and gas station fucking. Luke made it, with his body bathed in the blood of his enemies, and through all that, he still offered Michael the most gentleness he’d ever seen in his life. Luke made it, finding out he’d been manipulated into thinking he’d be killed, seeing the death of so many around him, watching the cemetery that had become of a village with so many people that he’d cared for. 

Luke made it. And he would always make it, because he deserved to live more than anyone else did. And the thought alone that Daryl would tell Michael that he’s wrong about this, makes his eyes burn in fury, his hands balled into fists, and a desperate cry escape his mouth as he punches Daryl’s chest.

The weirdest thing is that Daryl lets him.

His punches are weak because his whole body feels weak, not because he’s sad. He’s crying hard and choking up because he’s angry, not because he’s sad. He’s shouting ugly and unfair things, calling Daryl a liar and a dick, a bailer who bailed on him, even though he knows it’s not how it happened, because he’s fueled with rage, not because he’s sad. 

And Daryl holds his arms and only tries to get him to stop hitting him without hurting Michael, because he must see that Michael _is_ sad. He’s terrified and can’t stop shaking; the wound in his ear is bleeding again from how hard he pressed his hands against his ears before, and through his sobs, his punches lose strength until eventually Michael’s head falls to Daryl’s chest, the only solidness that keeps him from melting away, so it must indeed be sadness.

“Luke can’t be dead,” he murmurs, and this time he hears his whisper, a far away sound that echoes in his head cruelly, because as much as he exhausts himself in calling Daryl a liar, he knows he wouldn’t lie about something like that.

Daryl wraps his arms around Michael and properly sits on the floor with him.

Sobbing uncontrollably against his father, Michael lets his arms loosely go around him too. It’s their first hug, but it doesn’t feel like it. It doesn’t feel like anything. It smells to Michael’s fresh blood, to Daryl’s burned skin, tastes to the bile that keeps coming back to Michael’s mouth, and sounds to buzzing. In no way is what Michael ever expected his first hug with Daryl to be like. But it’s still a hug, because he clings to Daryl and Daryl clings back to him.

Like that they’re hidden, hard to spot. Two small broken dots in the dark.

* * *

They’re staying in one of the new houses, built for humans. Michael learns the next time he wakes up that from the twelve remaining humans, only two survived: Jason and Geordie. Geordie saw the explosives as not-Nathan stripped out of his shirt, managed to actually kick Jason as far as she could, and go down to protect herself against a table as she watched their friend Diana, daughter of the fallen human leader Ilana, disappear in the flames. 

Apparently, Geordie thinks it wasn’t the explosion that killed her, but the carbon in the air that stayed after. They were far away enough. It’s how Jason managed to survive with only an enormous purple bruise on his stomach from being kicked, and Geordie only had to deal with temporary deafness from the explosions. In a couple of hours, she was fine.

Michael knows he won’t.

Ten humans died. Daryl didn’t tell Michael how many witches, only snorted in disgust, with an arm still around his son, keeping him close as if he’s afraid to let go, and said, with disdain: “It’s like witch trials all over again. It was fucking Salem. Everyone burned.”

* * *

Daryl knocks on his door.

Michael knows it’s Daryl, because he knocks extra loudly so Michael will hear, and some moments he hears better than others, and this time is one of them. He also knows it’s Daryl, because he’s the only one Michael’s seen in the past day. He clears his throat, tries to find his voice to say that his father can come in, but his voice still hasn’t returned.

Daryl said it’s fine, that it’s from all the crying. Michael thinks his vocal cords are just as pissed at him as the rest of his body is. Daryl tried stitching back what was left of his ear so it’d stop bleeding, but there was nothing to stitch it back to, and Daryl ended up just cleaning the spot. He had this very serious look on his face as Michael cried. His crying had gone silent, just like the rest of the world, and the reason he knew wasn’t because he heard it, but because his chest had stopped shaking.

Daryl opens the door with a half-hearted smile and a tray of food. 

He raises his eyebrows, and Michael tries to uncurl himself from his own arms, but he’s not willing to interact enough. Instead he just coughs into his knees, arms still hugging his legs close to his chest. Daryl closes the door softly, so softly Michael doesn’t hear it at all, and pulls the only other piece of furniture of the room, a chair, closer to the bed.

The window is open. Daryl had opened it the last time he was there, saying absentmindedly that Michael could use some light. Michael had pretended he hadn’t heard it, and since Daryl didn’t repeat it louder, Michael assumed it wasn’t meant for him to hear anyway.

Daryl sits in front of him, putting the tray on his lap. It looks like overcooked rice with mashed potatoes. Michael can’t hear his stomach growl, but he can feel the flip, the hunger making his bottom lip quiver at the sight of food. Michael takes a deep breath, unpeeling his nose from towards his knees, and looks at Daryl, his half-burned face, and presses his lips together.

What he’d say is that he doesn’t understand how come Daryl was there when he first woke up, and that he seems to stay there, stay available, all the time, coming back to Michael’s room every couple of hours, when Daryl must have lost so, so much with the explosion. Michael doesn’t dare ask about the dead anymore, but he doesn’t think many people made it out alive. It hurts to think about it, because then he has to think of Luke and how he’s somewhere away from Michael but not dead, because Luke can’t die and won’t ever die.

His eyes start tearing up, and he closes them.

Daryl sighs heavily, loud enough that Michael hears it.

“You have to eat something, Michael.” And then, after a frustrated pause, a tone quieter, almost confused: “I made mashed potatoes.” 

A chuckle escapes from between his lips, and Michael opens his eyes again. The blurred version of his absent father frowns, looking at him, and the knuckles of his hands turn white with how tightly he’s holding the tray. Michael sniffs, and lets go of his knees, trying to sit down. He opens his mouth, but his voice cracks and he hates it, so he snorts, turning away, all attempt at good mood gone with how his body isn’t cooperating.

Daryl takes a deeper breather still.

“Halsey likes mashed potatoes,” he adds, small and unsure.

Michael looks at him again.

He hadn’t mentioned Halsey. It makes sense that she’s alive, Caleb escorting her out as soon as he’d brought the old Champions as per not-Nathan’s request, but still, hearing her name makes a chill go up his spine. But he isn’t surprised that she’s alive, not really, because she hasn’t betrayed him yet, like Cameron had warned him that she would. 

But in Cameron’s vision there was no Luke. 

Michael closes his eyes, taking the deepest breath his lungs will let him, and then he straightens himself to sit cross-legged. Daryl’s looking back at him like he’s made some terrible mistake by mentioning Halsey, so Michael tries his best to smile, and it does seem surprisingly effortless when he doesn’t think about it -- speaking, that is.

“I like it too,” he says. His voice sounds cracked and weird, like he’s hearing it through a broken tunnel, but he gives it no attention. “Thanks for doing that.” 

Daryl smiles. Properly smiles. It makes his heart ache to watch how little would give that supposed tyrant something to distract himself with; a little scrap of happiness for now. Michael’s smile seems to do that for him, so Michael tries to take that food and make it the same for him. He makes motion to take the tray from Daryl, and Daryl sets it in front of him on the bed. 

Taking advantage of his newly rediscovered speaking skills, he murmurs: “Mom never let me eat in bed,” he snorts. He takes the spoon, gets as much as of both the mashed potatoes and rice, and brings it to his mouth. The feeling of eating after what feels like a solid day with no food, makes him close his eyes in relief.

He doesn’t feel particularly hungry, but his body does. It’s conflicting but not enough to take away the relief that makes him feel like his shoulders are relaxing for the first time today. Mentioning Karen after everything, though, it’s… it’s not right. He looks at Daryl, still chewing his food, but Daryl’s too focused on the fact that Michael’s eating to think about Karen or, apparently, be suspicious of who bombed his house.

The food is hard to swallow.

And the next words are hard to say.

But as if to prove their own irony, his vocal cords work perfectly when he says it:

“It was her… the bomb, yesterday. It was Mom.”

Michael watches as Daryl’s expression changes in slow-motion. The whole world slows down so Michael can watch this without missing a single detail. He may not have perfect hearing, may not be able to recognize how his breath becomes slowly more intense and how you could listen to his pause. But he sees just as well as the next person: he can see the expression of contentment fading away to give place to confusion. It spreads over his face as his frown deepens, and then the frowns means something else. It’s something in his eyes. It’s rage.

Michael averts his eyes to the food on the tray in front of him, one hand still holding the spoon, the other wrapping around his ankle. He tries to swallow the lump in his throat that keeps coming back whenever he seems to be rid of it.

“She thought I was your prisoner. She warned you, didn’t she?” Michael snorts, but the tears come back with the thoughts, burning his nostrils before they fog his vision any further. “You told me that day when I asked you why you didn’t come after me when she became a Council member and you knew where we were,” he wets his lips, taking a deep breath, but he can’t seem to make himself breathe enough to fill his lungs. “You said she threatened to find your city and bomb it if you ever took me from her. She did it.”

Daryl doesn’t answer, and Michael doesn’t look at him to know what’s going on inside his head.

The tears come with a hiccup this time, and his shoulders start feeling too weak, until the feeling of weakness spreads to all of his muscles and to the core of his being. He feels so powerless, between two of the most powerful and relevant people of the country -- the leader of the Chaos, their broken King without a home and Champions, and the Council member who went into hiding when her son was arrested, but somehow remains in charge of enough people that one went to die just to send a message for Daryl. In the middle there’s him, choked up and and letting go of the spoon so he can cover his mouth with both of his shaking hands.

“It was because of me… I killed all those people,” he says, and his voice becomes either louder or quieter, but the buzzing engulfs him again, and he can’t quite hear what he’s saying, just feel his mouth moving and the thoughts leaving him through his tongue. “I killed Ashton. I killed… I killed Luke,” he says, even though he’s lying, even though it can’t be it.

His whole body shakes again, and he stares down with his eyes burning too.

Daryl takes the tray away, and wraps his arms around him.

This time, there’s no hesitation or room for awkwardness. Like it somehow brings him some redemption, Michael closes his eyes, both of his arms going around his father as he buries his face in Daryl’s chest, crying hard, Daryl holding him in place so he doesn’t melt away like he has compulsively for the past hours.

“It’s not your fault. It isn’t,” he manages to hear Daryl saying, right next to his good ear.

But his stomach flipping and the sobbing tell him otherwise.

He puts some distance between them, regaining some of his composure, enough that he can speak. He holds his father by his arms so Daryl will be forced to look at him. Daryl’s eyes are big and a mix of rage and confusion and sadness and Michael won’t try to read anything into it.

“I had nightmares about this. I knew this would happen. I knew that by being near me… I knew he’d end up dead. Everyone told me, too, in different times.” The desperation in his voice makes it loud, but Daryl doesn’t wince or look away. He just frowns and mouths something that looks like _not your fault_ , but Michael doesn’t want to read lips. He wants to say what he needs to say, because if he doesn’t, it’ll eat him alive. Maintaining eye-contact is what keeps him grounded, more than Daryl’s arms keeping him from disappearing. “Back when they rescued me, Halsey told me… she told me she knew my kind. That I was selfish. Said that if something happened to him, it would be his blood in my hands.” Daryl tries to interrupt him, but Michael tilts his chin up, parts his lips again, taking the deepest breath his body will let him, his tears rolling freely down his cheek. Daryl doesn’t bother trying to stop them, must know he can’t. “Then Jack said the same. Said that if something happened to Luke, that was on me. Because it _is_ true, Dad: I am selfish. I knew he’d get hurt being with me. But I didn’t… I only thought of myself and what was good for me. He knew, so I couldn’t stand the thought of pushing him away.”

“Michael--” Daryl tries, his tone strong and urgent.

He ignores it. “And now he’s dead,” he lifts his shoulders, chuckling lowly through his tears.

It sounds so bitter and disgusted that it only makes him cry harder, makes his chest shake with the sobs, and he’s ready to give up on trying to keep still and composed, letting his head drop back, lifeless, just like all the people dead because of him, but Daryl holds him by the neck and forces Michael to look at him.

“Listen to me,” Daryl says, sounding even more forceful than before. “Listen very fucking carefully, alright?” he raises his eyebrows. His tone is scary, but Michael’s not scared of anything anymore. He’s still crying hard, still feeling like this is pointless, but Daryl’s hands on the sides of his face don’t give him any option but to look him in the eye. “It is not selfish to want happiness. Do you understand that? That is not what selfishness is.”

Michael holds his breath, looking his father in the eye.

Daryl never knew Luke had another magick, the fabricated magick of mind control, but if he did, maybe he’d find out he’s good with that, too. The way he’s looking at Michael, holding him still, makes Michael allow himself to breathe a little better, like he’s learning to keep himself alive all over again. It isn’t enough that it makes him better, but it does get him to finally fill his lungs with air and not feel his chest hurt and sink when he exhales. 

He nods slowly, setting his jaw, trying to bite back more tears, because he doesn’t need them.

“Good,” Daryl says, sighing heavily. “Now that that part is out of the way, it’s _not_ your fault. Luke’s your age, and he’s been living like an adult for far longer than you. Pushing him away to protect him is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” he adds, frowning, shaking his head a bit. His hold on Michael’s neck loosens, and Michael finds the strength to keep steady. “That would be not only bad for you, but that would also be treating him like a child who doesn’t know better. He wanted to be with you. All his life, even before he met you. You never pulled him into a life of danger. He was born into it, and happily went into battle every single time, because he knew he’d eventually find his way to you. He’d be so pissed if you ever pushed him away for something like that.”

Michael chews on his bottom lip, and Daryl lets go, his hands falling to his lap, sitting close to Michael and in front of him. “But he would be alive,” he adds, as an afterthought.

Daryl doesn’t have a response to that.

Adjusting himself better on the bed so he’s more comfortable, Daryl clears his throat, frowning and staring down suddenly. Michael takes another successful deep breath and sinks his teeth on his bottom lip, already knowing what this is about. 

Michael would like to know when it happened that he crossed the line of fear and hatred to indifference, and when it happened exactly that the final line was crossed and he came to not only care about Daryl the way he does now, but that he doesn’t mind the proximity, sitting close in a single bed, with a tray of food to the side and vulnerability on both sides making the room seem claustrophobic and absolutely comfortable at the same time.

“Is it too soon to ask about what you said, Michael?” 

Michael licks his lips, looking away. “The guy wasn’t Nathan, he… I was with Benji and Joel once, looking at their tattoos, I guess maybe entertaining the idea of having one myself,” he shrugs, the idea now a thought from another life. “Benji said that even if shapeshifters steal your face, they can’t steal your ink.”

Daryl nods slowly. “That’s why most warriors get tattoos. So they’re never replicated by the enemy.”

Trying his best not to roll his eyes at the terms, Michael raises his eyebrows. “So anyway. The same day, Joel told us he tattooed Nathan’s back. Wings.” Daryl gives him the same dull look, as if that’s nothing new. “That guy didn’t have any wings tattooed. He had a dragon tattooed on his back. Tati dropped a drink on him by accident, and when he turned I could see it better.”

This gets Daryl’s attention.

He frowns, looking at Michael. “I know who did it, Michael. I know who Karen sent.” Michael holds his breath, but Daryl’s not as eager to build suspense as Jack is. He says, matter-of-factly: “Erik Nijak. He was a shapeshifter, and Karen was always…” he rolls his eyes.

“She always manipulated him and made sure he was available for her. It’s alright. You can say it. I’ve been seeing it since I was ten,” he says, staring back at Daryl. Daryl lifts his shoulders, and Michael chuckles lowly, even if there’s no humor in that. “That means Lynda Nijak never left her side, even after I was arrested. She’s Mom’s eyes in the Council.”

Daryl nods slowly, his lips pressed together. 

He turns away from Michael, shaking his head lightly, and takes deep breaths. He says something, but he’s turned away from Michael and closer to Michael’s bad ear, so he can’t hear what Daryl says, but his expression is concerned. Turned back to the chair, his feet planted on the floor, he rests his elbows on his knees, and runs his hands over his head. 

Michael knows what he’s thinking about. The deal he had with Order.

Michael wonders in what end of that deal Nijak was. If she was one of the people Daryl was supposed to protect, or to kill. Michael isn’t sure he wants to know, either. He’s just feeling so incredibly lighter to know that Karen’s terrorist man, although being someone who saw Michael grow up, was still someone as deeply rooted in Order as someone could be.

Which goes to say, Jack probably had nothing to do with this attack at least.

He thinks. He hopes.

God, it would make everything so much better if that’s the case.

Slowly, Michael reaches back for the tray, and pulls it to his lap, on top of his crossed legs. Daryl looks at him, gives him the tiniest bit of smiles, and then he’s back inside his own head. 

Michael eats his overcooked rice and mashed potatoes. All of his body hurts, his head aches fiercely from all the crying, his nostrils and eyes burn the worst, and his neck and ear still vibrate with pain every couple of seconds. His boyfriend is dead. Ashton is also dead. No matter how Daryl puts it, Michael still thinks it’s his fault.

But being guilty and being bathed in people’s blood is exhausting. 

It’s still the most delicious meal of his life.

* * *

Michael eats and sleeps and then makes himself sleep some more because entertaining the thought of getting out of bed makes him feel boneless. By the third day of Daryl bringing him food and allowing him to swallow himself in self-pity and mourning, things change.

Daryl knocks on his door, as usual, and this time he isn’t crying and he isn’t shaking, and though sleeping is most of what he does, he barely moves at all. His body is stiff and he’s staring at the ceiling, thinking back of all the things he could have and should have said to Luke, and then Daryl comes in when Michael says nothing to stop him from doing so.

He’s hungry, but his father doesn’t carry a tray this time.

“You’re taking a shower,” Daryl says, pointing at the other door in the bedroom, “and then you’re coming to the kitchen with me and Halsey to eat, and we’re going to have dinner like a family.”

Michael stares blankly at him.

Like a family. Huh.

He doesn’t move.

Daryl stares at him.

“I’m only leaving once you get up.” 

It’s Michael’s turn to stare at him. He turns on his side, propping up on his elbows, and frowns at his father. Daryl looks absolutely sure of himself, and Michael can’t wait but stumble upon thoughts of Daryl as a full-time parent, which he isn’t, never was, and probably will die before he has the chance to be. Michael cocks an eyebrow, and snorts.

“I don’t feel like showering.”

Apparently having thought of that possibility, it doesn’t catch Daryl off guard at all. He lifts his shoulders, looking unapologetic. “Then I hope you don’t feel like eating, either.”

Michael narrows his eyes. “You can’t deny me food.”

Daryl gives him the smallest of smiles. “Watch me.”

And Michael does. For a few seconds there, he does watch Daryl, and it makes him feel sick in his stomach. Not because he doesn’t approve of what he’s doing, which, in an odd way, he does. It’s just that it reminds MIchael so much of Karen, the way he just stands there, demanding that Michael takes care of himself when he’s long given up on that. It makes him hate himself how much he misses her, how much he dreams of waking up in her arms, because she’s the reason all of this happened. She’s the reason Luke’s dead, and so is most of the people who were in that ceremony. 

Except, it isn’t truly her fault. It’s his, because he could’ve found a way to contact her, and he didn’t. Why didn’t he? _Why_?

Michael sighs heavily, rolling his eyes. “Are you just going to stand there forever?”

Daryl doesn’t say anything, and doesn’t move, either. He just stands there, still holding the doorknob with one hand, and it appears that he could stand there forever if dared to.

It hasn’t been that long, Michael thinks -- self-care has become a distant thought in the back of his mind. He makes no effort to stay out of his head, either. It’s easier to let the guilt and shame crowd him, because when he makes the smallest of efforts, they hunt him down instead, and then he’s left with the thought of failure: that though he tried to stay out of those toxic thoughts, they caught up to him. Michael hates failing at things. He feels like he failed Ashton and the dead woman with the gray hair. He failed Daryl’s old Champions. 

He failed Luke.

“If I shower,” Michael starts, taking a deep breath.

For Daryl to properly interrupt him, he’d have to be on his way to saying a complete sentence, which doesn’t seem to be the case. But still, Daryl takes the cue, and nods slowly. “I’ll leave. And Halsey and I will be waiting for you in the kitchen.”

Michael never left his room. He doesn’t know which way’s the kitchen, but judging by how small his room is, he’d say the rest of the house can’t be exactly the type where you get lost in.

“Alright,” he nods, “I’ll do it.”

Daryl nods. He says one more thing before he goes, one thing Michael understands in its most basic concept -- words familiar, same language, volume loud enough that it doesn’t get lost in the constant buzz inside his head -- but still it’s quite difficult to grasp.

“I’m proud of you,” he says, and then leaves.

* * *

The water’s way too cold, but he doesn’t mind. He closes his eyes and holds his breath, facing the cold stream as if it could wash away more than the sweat from three days. Michael prays to whoever will listen to him, that he stops feeling so numb. 

He remembers the five stages of grief, from books and television, when he didn’t really think about it much. He remembers denial, anger, bargaining, depression, until finally acceptance. What he doesn’t remember is the numbness that makes it hard to keep move, even though he can breathe just fine, and his muscles no longer seem to hate him. His audition sort of does; he seems to hear better only when he doesn’t want to. But other than that, he’s not sure which stage he’s stuck at. Maybe somewhere between bargaining and depression. Only he doesn’t want to get to acceptance.

Or maybe he should.

Maybe-- Maybe he should just get out of the shower.

The water is cold and his stomach is growling, and at least there are two other people in this house who’ve survived the same attack as he did, and to different extents, understand the emotional paralysis he finds himself facing. Of course he won’t talk about it. But it should help, he thinks, at least seeing them.

Knowing that they’re both alright should help stitch up his broken heart.

Maybe he’ll stop thinking about dead Luke and terrorist not-Nathan and who exactly is going to explain to Harry, Lauren, and Anne, that Ashton survived the Order putting him on the corridor of death, but blew up with the rest of the house when the bomb went off.

Michael shakes his head and the thoughts away. Puts on clean clothes that Daryl left on his bed, probably when he locked himself in the bathroom. And with a deep breath, he leaves his room.

* * *

He was right to assume the house wasn’t big. It’s the smallest place he ever stayed in, if he doesn’t count his stay at the Order prison, which he isn’t. Outside of his room there’s a narrow corridor with two other doors. Michael assumes it’s Daryl’s and Halsey’s bedrooms, and then it opens on a space that’s both the living room and the kitchen. 

Michael shifts his weight to the other side, feeling a little awkward.

He’s been trying to keep out of his head, desperately staying trapped in it in the attempts to leave the most toxic thoughts, but in the struggle of his body against his mind, he ended up not thinking much about what he’d find once he left. He certainly didn’t expect to find Daryl and Halsey sitting across from each other, eating something that looked less like food and more like human ration. Not in the way they are, anyway. Everything about it looks straight out of a science fiction movie. The light is too ruthless and bright in the lamp over their heads, and the ceiling isn’t tall enough that Michael can escape Daryl’s badly burned skin, or Halsey’s big round eyes, red with crying. She’s attempting to smile, her hair wet but pulled in a messy bun.

The rawness of the emotion shared between them seconds before Michael comes in makes him feel unstable, like his feet aren’t enough to keep his steady.

It could be just his lack of balance striking again, though.

He spreads his palm against the wall on his right, taking a deep breath, and it disrupts their quiet conversation. Halsey looks at him in a funny way, but Daryl smiles, standing up and helping him sit down. Michael lets him help, his ego and pride long vanished, and it makes him smile just the tiniest bit of smiles at his father, to think that it doesn’t feel uncomfortable and awkward to be touched by him, as Daryl wraps an arm around his middle to help him to his seat.

He sits next to Halsey.

Halsey looks past him and to his ear instead.

“Yeah,” he says, and presses his lips together.

It’s the first thing he’s told her since the attack. 

She blinks a couple of times, and then looks away, down at her food once more. Daryl serves him a plate of the ration looking food, and Michael eats wordlessly for a few seconds. It doesn’t taste too good, but Michael’s scared to ask about what’s the food situation in Death Valley right now, if that’s what the King is eating and offering his children.

He snorts. The thought is so dumb.

“What is it?” Daryl asks, raising his eyebrow. His tone is docile.

“Just thinking,” Michael shrugs, then lowers his head. “How are you feeling?” he asks his food.

He’s definitely asking the plate in front of him and not his father or his not-really sister, because if he’s asking one of the other two people in here, he’ll have to deal with honest answers, and he isn’t ready for that, he thinks. The numbness hasn’t left him, and he can’t risk lack of empathy.

Daryl starts saying something. Michael can hear his reticent voice, thinking of something to say, probably looking for balance between truth and omission, but Halsey speaks first, dead-panning: “Caleb’s dead.”

It’s so abrupt that Michael looks at her with a frown.

He supposes she’s giving the answer to what he asked. It’s still not what he wanted to hear, but.

“But I thought,” he starts, and he trails off, because he can’t quite understand. He turns to Daryl, but Daryl’s looking at his food like it’s extremely interesting, and Halsey’s still eyeing at him, inviting him to a staring contest. Michael blinks a couple of times, shaking his head slightly. “I saw you two leave.”

“Well, I didn’t want to leave,” Halsey says, sighing softly, but still every bit of challenging as she can be. As if she’s daring Michael to not hear her, to stop her from saying what she needs to say. He makes an effort to look at her, even if it hurts. He’s sitting so his good ear is on her side, and he wishes that wasn’t so. “We argued outside. It lasted only a couple of minutes, but then again, it wasn’t long before that maniac blew up,” she cocks an eyebrow. “I said I changed my mind. I wanted to be present. I wanted to see what was going to happen. But Caleb is -- he was, I mean, he was such a fucking kiss-ass,” she rolls her eyes, resentful.

Daryl gives her a warning look. “Halsey.”

“I’m sorry, but,” she chokes up, shakes her head, looks away from Michael and to her adoptive father. “He just kept insisting that he had clear orders from you. That you didn’t want me any near the other Champions when they celebrated their new Head. I tried using my magick on him, even, to get him out of my way,” she snorts, lifting her shoulders, unapologetically, and Daryl presses his lips together. “He shoved me away.”

Michael’s not looking at her anymore. He’s looking at the center of the table, frowning at it like it can give him more answers than the people around him can. “Was he close to the door, then? Or some window? Did the explosion catch him?”

Halsey chuckles lowly, dryly, and it sounds so hurt that it makes Michael’s sore ears hurt. “It fucking,” she starts, then stops herself. Before today, he doesn’t think he’d ever seen Halsey swear in front of Daryl. He’d never seen her as lost as this in front of the King of Chaos before at all. She looks at Michael, really looks at him. “He was thrown against a wall. I was only thrown a couple of feet, only got bruises, but Caleb? I saw his arm detach from his fucking body,” she raises her eyebrows, and they well up. 

Michael takes a deep breath, then lets it out slowly through his mouth.

He counts the times she said _fucking_ in his head. He was such a fucking kiss-ass. It fucking. Saw his arm detach from his fucking body.

“Halsey, please,” Daryl says, his tone a little louder and more parental somehow. Like telling her there are lines she’s not meant to cross, and he’ll be holding her back if he has to.

But she doesn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes are full of tears and she’s got a lump in her throat, and she touches Michael’s arm in a way that makes sure Michael looks back at her, even though he’s trying not to, even though he’s trying his best to just pretend none of this is happening.

“I hated him half the time, you know that? But the other half. I mean, you don’t know what that’s like, Michael, what it’s like when you’re a Champion. They’ll fucking stab you if they feel like it’s what’s fair, but they’ll do it to your front. Because to the rest of the world? They’ll have your back always. And I didn’t have his,” she forces a smile, ugly and terribly guilty.

Michael shakes his head, feeling a sudden agony making his stomach flip. “It’s not your fault, Halsey. It’s really, really not your fault.”

She laughs. Properly laughs, throwing her head back, and in her desperation she reminds him a little of Luke, back in room 93, back when he thought he and everyone he loved was meant to die. He was ready to think they were living on an expired date. It was Michael who had been foolish to think they could do more with what they had.

“Tell me, Michael, how is it not my fault?” she raises both eyebrows, wide-eyed and getting too close. Daryl calls her name again, louder still, but they both ignore him. “If I wasn’t stubborn, if for once I’d just said okay, he’d be alive. And if Caleb was alive, then I wouldn’t be the last one standing,” she says, and her voice starts changing towards the end of it, becoming something so cruelly honest that it makes Michael wince. “It hurts so much to be the last one,” she shakes her head, a sob escaping her lips. “No other Champion alive. They’re all dead. It’s only me.”

It’s visceral, how it makes him want to throw up and curl into a ball and just. Just never again--

Michael takes a deep breath, and talks over Daryl and his attempt to get Halsey to see something she clearly can’t. “Halsey, listen,” he starts, though he’s not sure where he’s going. Daryl reaches for her over the table, touches her hand, but when she looks at him, distracted by the touch, Michael finds in him what is it that he wants to say. “None of this is your fault. There’s something you don’t know, and I think you should.”

Squeezing Halsey’s hand, Daryl says, without looking away from the blue-haired girl: “I think I should be the one to tell her, Michael.”

Michael pauses, frowning and putting some distance between Halsey and himself. He looks at Daryl, but Daryl still doesn’t look at him. He’s got his eyes on Halsey, and she on him.

Holding his breath, it’s almost as if he can’t hear them.

But he can. He can.

“Dear,” Daryl starts, in a tone of voice that is maybe reserved to Halsey, like the pet name that Michael had never see him use. He’s still stroking her hand, and she’s letting him, teary-eyed and still looking on the verge of maybe another breakdown. “It’s on me. I had a deal with someone in the Council of the Order. The rest of the Council found out, and bombed the house with most of its warriors so I wouldn’t attack them.” 

Michael tries swallowing the lump in his throat.

In his head, he screams for Daryl to stop, to not take the blame, that this is on him and on him alone. That it’s about Karen and how he didn’t reach for her. That this is about his neglect, about her questionable parenting. 

But he doesn’t. He stays quiet. Choked up and his mouth shut.

Halsey blinks tears away, taking a deep breath. “You had a deal with the Order? I don’t understand.”

“Serves me right,” he breathes out heavily, and there must be some truth to his regret, if his tone and the way he closes his eyes for a second are anything to go by. “I lost so, so much. I lost my house and so many people I cared about. But that was about politics. I shouldn’t have gotten involved, and I did, and so everyone suffered.”

“No,” Michael mouths, but can’t make his voice be heard.

He’s staring at Daryl, shaking his head slowly, but Daryl doesn’t look at him.

Halsey doesn’t, either. She’s holding her adoptive father’s hand tightly, now between both of her hands, and she looks as if she’s breathed in some courage, some freshness, and maybe Michael gets it, the benefit between the lie, but it only makes him feel guiltier -- though perhaps that’s not the point. This is not to benefit him as much as it is to benefit her. Or maybe as much of both as Daryl can manage.

“I can’t have you feeling like you’re to blame on top of that, you see,” he says, lifting his shoulders, without letting go of her hand. “It wasn’t a random attack. I was reckless.”

Michael’s knee starts going up and down under the table. He looks down and stares at his food. He picks at it, feeling hungry and yet too nervous to actually touch it.

“Well, we have to come up with a plan. When are you leaving for the city?” she asks.

Daryl snorts. He looks at her for a moment, then at Michael. “I can’t go now, Halsey, I can’t leave any of you alone.” Michael’s frown grows deeper, and he stares at his food more intently. “Plus, there’s no we. I’ll come up with a plan when I come up with a plan. I need you here.”

She breathes out heavily, annoyed. “I’m still a Champion. You didn’t get the chance to name anyone else your Head Champion,” she argues, sounding a bit desperate. Michael looks at her, but it’s brief, and then he’s staring down again. “Look, first, who do you think is working with the Order? Because if that was an Order witch, a shape-shifter with Nate’s face, someone still needs to have sent him here. Maybe the same person who gave away the location of the human village.”

Michael remembers the first person considered to be a spy was Ashton. And then slowly, with the passing time, it became more and more evident to him it had to be Jack -- not that he ever truly considered Ashton as a spy. But now, he’s not so sure it even matters.

Maybe it was Jack. If it’s Jack, he’s as responsible for Luke’s death as Michael is.

If it’s not, then it matters just as little. It won’t bring Luke back. It won’t bring any of the dead back.

“Annika and Nathan, probably,” Daryl gestures dismissively, letting go of Halsey’s hand. “It’s obvious they were captured. Under torture they must’ve cracked. Annika probably did first, and then after weeks Nathan did, and then the shapeshifter took his form and paid us a visit.”

Michael chooses to stop listening.

He still does, only the voices becomes echoes when he doesn’t struggle to pay attention to the sounds. So he lets his mind wander, his sight focused on the food, and he tries to get himself to eat while the voices through the tunnel keep talking to each other.

“That’s not possible. Annika would never. None of them would, but especially not her.”

“What else? It had to be them. It explains so much.”

“They’re not traitors, Daryl.” 

“You’ve never been--”

“What, under torture? Because I have. Remember? I have. Three months in the Order prison. Nearly got myself killed, and all for-- all for _Ursula_.”

“Don’t-- the eye drops needed to find her. She’s in an important mission. Plus I came back for you.”

“I’m not questioning that. I’m just saying: I didn’t crack.”

“But you’re special.”

Silence.

Silence expands and Michael feels like he can eat better.

The voices aren’t as brutal with him, even from so far outside, but then they come back again. Halsey’s voice, reticent and tired, not as bitter or resentful as it had been before when talking about Caleb, but still not alright. Michael hears it more clearly than he wants to, so he tries to make himself forget the second he hears her say it. 

“Promise me you’ll take me when you decide to go to the city. Whoever’s responsible for what happened here… I’ll make them pay.”

* * *

The first time Michael leaves the house is on the fifth day of the attack.

There’s something unnerving about breathing the same air as two other people. He’s coming to terms with how badly he needs them, how much easier it is to pretend like they’re all there’s left in the world, and Karen doesn’t have to be held responsible for her acts and neither does he.

But at the same time, it’s smothering.

Daryl wants to make sure they’re both alright all the time. Halsey’s angry all the time. Michael’s just numb. He’s stuck. He finds himself under the cold water in the shower with his forehead pressed to the even colder wall tile. He finds himself staring at the ceiling on his bed, and then sitting on the kitchen table, not taking part in whatever Halsey and Daryl are arguing about this time. 

War. Revenge. Scars. Resilience. 

The last word catches Michael’s ear but just a bit.

He knows it’s late, the eternal fireflies just barely illuminating the sky when he opens the window of his bedroom, but he can’t bear to breathe in the same air, to let himself suffocate with love and rage for any other second. 

He jumps the window, on his pajamas and bare feet. 

His neck still hurts a lot when he moves too fast, but he doesn’t care. He walks the badly paved street that he doesn’t remember ever going to before, the sites that were under construction when they left. And just behind the house, expanding for an area that looks far too big, endless even, is a cemetery. It’s a new one. 

It’s shiny and bright only it isn’t. It’s dark and dirty and already dusty too.

He takes a deep breath. Breathes in this tragedy instead of the one he has at home.

There are no graves, only small blocks of wood with names engraved. No time for birthdates and death dates. The latter is the same for all of them, anyway.

The first row is for the Champions. 

Davis, Annika.

Hemmings, Luke.

Irwin, Ashton.

Ortiz, Nathan.

Parker, Caleb.

Setting his jaw, he walks to Luke’s name like he’s a poor magnet with no free will. He sits on his knees in front of the piece of wood, touching with trembling fingers. Under his touch, it’s solid proof that he’s gone. 

He looks ahead, and everything blurs.

Michael takes the deepest breath that he can.

“I said: forty-six,” he hears, behind him.

Michael recognizes the voice, but he doesn’t want to look just yet. It’s an invasion of privacy, or so it feels that way. He’s come to say goodbye, or to at least say something, and he can’t do that now. He lowers his head, just turning it to the side a little, so he’ll hear the next thing he says better.

“Are you fucking deaf,” Dennis half-asks, half-states, stopping behind him. “I called your name a thousand times, prince.”

Michael sighs softly, his gaze fixed on Luke’s name. “Forty-six what?” he asks, without looking.

Dennis comes closer. He sounds a little out of breath, like it’s been a big effort just getting there. Michael doesn’t care, eyes still fixated, tunnel vision to match his tunnel hearing. “Forty-six dead,” he says, in a dark way that raises goosebumps to Michael’s arms. 

A stutter comes out when he tries to say something. He turns to properly look at Dennis, and he gets how short of breath he was. He’s standing with the help of two crutches. Usually, Michael wouldn’t have missed their clicks, but -- no, not usually. Before. Before he wouldn’t. Now he does. And it’s not only the crutches, of course. It’s his legs. One of them is gone. His left leg ends somewhere before his knee, or at least that’s how it seems, because the jeans has been folded in a way that Michael can’t look more than that.

He still stares, nonetheless.

“Take a picture,” Dennis says.

Michael finally raises his eyes to him. “I’m sorry, but,” he frowns. “No, that’s it. I’m sorry.”

Dennis rolls his eyes, and passes him.

“Harry’s pissed at you. I kept telling him to not have any expectations, that you’re nobody’s prince, but,” he shrugs, or the closest to that he can when he’s resting his weight on the crutches so heavily. “But he won’t listen. Was somehow caught in believing you cared.”

Michael blinks a couple of times, and stands up, walks to him.

He realizes Dennis is standing in front of the name Madden, Joel.

“Fuck,” Michael mutters, turning his head away.

It’s brutal, somehow, twelve year old Dennis leaving his house in the middle of the night to visit his father’s grave, in a cemetery with other forty-five killed. Michael feels sick, like he may throw up, but tries to keep it together anyway. Dennis isn’t ready to talk for a second, and then finally, he says: “Shit, I hope… I really hope he made it.”

The sickness gets worse. Michael can feel his stomach in knots.

“Made it?” he repeats, quietly.

Dennis nods. “Haven’t found the body. Presumably blew up with the guy, too close to the explosion for us to have a body to bury, but,” he lifts one shoulder, still staring. “I think Tati still believes there’s a chance he’s alive, so I’m deciding whether I should set myself for disappointment or not.” 

“How’s Tati?” Michael asks, small, looking away from Joel’s name, having a hard time accepting that’s all he’s become.

“Deaf on one ear,” Dennis deadpans.

“Me too.”

Dennis glares at him. “Hooray.” 

“No, I mean,” he starts, but shakes his head when Dennis keeps giving him that look. “Why’s Harry mad at me? You were saying, I mean… You said he was pissed. Is it because--? I don’t know what I could’ve done to save him, to save anyone,” he lies, because he does. Only what he could’ve done should’ve been done a long time earlier, so Karen would’ve never gotten to that point of desperation. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

“He’s not pissed you didn’t magically save everyone,” Dennis narrows his eyes. “He’s pissed you’re not doing anything to save them now.”

“Them,” Michael repeats, nodding slowly.

But he doesn’t understand.

Dennis snorts. “If you think for one second that Dad would leave me, would leave us… just like that. If you believe for one second that Dad would leave Mom to deal with me and Tati like that, that he’d leave Uncle Benji to deal with the fact that he’s the one who wanted to fight and he’s the one who lived… if you believe that. If you think that Ashton would just leave Harry… You never knew them at all.”

It hurts too much to look at him. They’re in a cemetery buried in an underground city, and yet it seems as if they’re in the quiet of a small church, just as justified but bathed in sin as they could be. Michael looks away, lips sinking on his bottom lip for a second too long. When he releases, he says, voice small but certain:

“They didn’t leave, Dennis. They’re dead. Death is not abandonment.”

“Oh, but it is,” he replies, coming closer to Michael. “It is. And they wouldn’t. So you find a way to go after them, or Harry and I will find a way to go ourselves.”

Michael’s throat is dry.

He follows Dennis with his eyes, watches as Dennis slowly moves away until he’s completely out of sight. He feels sicker and sicker, until there’s no more holding it. He tries running to as furthest away from the cemetery as he can, but still dishonours the dead by throwing up, with his knees and bare feet against the dirt, and his sweaty face staring down at the mess he’s made as his chest goes up and down erratically.

Dennis thinks they’re alive.

Michael’s eyes and throat burn, but he isn’t sure if it’s because he’s feeling sick anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> big, big thanks to my friends ana, carlos and jodie, who told me a lot about partial deafness and allowed me to ask all sorts of weird questions so i can make this as respectful and tasteful as possible. also big shout-out to the lovely anne who didn't mind telling me a lot about her own experiences on disability that came from an accident. you guys are super awesome. thanks for helping me write this story in a (hopefully) meaningful way. ❤


	32. we may be hollow but we're brave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !!!! I AM SO EXCITED AND HAPPY TO POST THIS. thank you so much for the massive response to the last chapter, oh my god.   
>  i hope you like this one too. much love!!! ❤❤❤

If you look at anything for too long, you get to watch it change into something entirely different.

Michael’s a firm believer that this is as true as your own name sounding strange in your lips if you repeat it too many times. So as he lies on Halsey’s bed in front of her, and they watch each other in silence, he’s sure that it isn’t only that he’s watching her change, but she’s watching him change, too. The mutual character of the process is the scariest part.

The light’s off, and he’s lying on his left, so he’s not applying any pressure to his neck or right ear, but it still feels as if his body is off balance, even lying down. She spent quite some time just staring at the wounds, at the stitches, saying nothing but taking mental pictures. Michael gets that, because he’s been doing the same. Looking at her to memorize even the smallest things. The tattoos on her shoulders, the faded blue of her hair, the roundness of her eyes, and most of all, the silence that comes from her. 

It’s peaceful and regretful at once, and he understands that the most. 

“I visited the cemetery last night,” he says, very carefully, tone quiet.

She doesn’t move at all. She’s busy changing, as is he.

“I don’t want to go there.”

Michael would nod, but he doesn’t want to move either, so instead he breathes out softly, and says: “I met Dennis. He thinks some of them can still be alive. No bodies and all.”

This is it. This is the time he gets to hold his breath and quietly wait for the change he needs the most. He needs for some hope to make her eyes glassier, so he knows it’s alright to stop feeling sick in his stomach when the possibilities make his head spin, and he isn’t sure what’s delusion anymore. 

Michael misses him so much.

Halsey snorts, the most bitter smile making her face look ugly for a second. “No bodies because they were blown up.” She pauses, staring right into his eyes. It’s like she sees right into his soul, and he doesn’t like it, but doesn’t look away, either. “Where would they be, anyway? Do you really think any of them would’ve just escaped?”

She says the word _escaped_ in a way that makes Michael wrinkle his nose, feeling a sour taste come to his mouth. None of them were supposed to need any escaping from Death Valley. Death Valley was the place Daryl, his parents, his old peers as Champions, they all built to bring safety to Chaos witches. Then again, if he thinks about it, maybe they needed escaping from Michael and his mess. He was supposed to be the savior of these people; wasn’t that what Cameron’s prophecy had predicted? That he’d guide them out of there and back into the world? So far all he’d brought was destruction. Anything attached to him was destruction. His sister before him, killing their brother and almost killing Halsey in the process. Daryl sought death, and death sought him back. Karen… Michael didn’t even know where to start with Karen. The years of manipulation, keeping Erik Nijak at an arm’s length at all times; sickening to think in which ways she was using that his grand finale was going up in pieces to send a message to Michael’s father.

But he was the only common factor between these people. 

For all that’s happened and all that’s yet to happen, from his former best friend swearing to never forgive him to the vacant and numb look in his eyes as he guides people out of Death Valley in the visions that were shown to him, Michael’s convinced that he’s Death itself.

Maybe, if Luke and Ashton and Joel and all those other forty-three people were smart enough, what they did was escape him.

“I don’t know,” he says, taking a deep breath, keeping his voice quiet. “But Dennis seems convinced. Harry, too, from what he said. Tati thinks her Dad is alive, and the boys might’ve picked up on that. Or maybe the other way around, I don’t… I don’t know.”

Halsey gives him a pitiful look, pressing her lips together for a second.

“They’re dead, Michael,” she says, with casualty, and then, her eyes hardening, she adds: “The sooner you accept that, the better.”

Michael knows this isn’t about moving on. 

The only reason Daryl’s put a hold on his mission in town is because he doesn’t want to leave Michael and Halsey alone now, emphasis on Michael. Whenever Michael starts acting like a human being again, properly operating his own body without looking transfixed by the sight of walls and ceilings and floors, Daryl is probably going to organize himself with whoever’s still willing to fight and march towards the city. Regardless of his wanting it or not, Halsey will be by his side.

The sooner Michael accepts they’re all dead, the sooner Halsey gets her revenge.

Michael sighs, finally breaking eye-contact with her, and turning away, on his back, with his eyelids softly closed. He tries to shake off the demons that start clawing at his shoulders and back. On one side, he hears nothing. On the other, he hears Halsey’s anxious breathing. Constantly anxious now, it seems.

“Have you talked to anyone?” he asks, lowly.

And by that he means: how much more death and destruction does he not know about?

Halsey keeps still, looking at him. It takes her a couple of seconds to compose herself; she starts speaking but then stops before the first syllable, the hesitation just barely there for Michael to catch. “I don’t,” she starts again, then stops. Michael doesn’t look at her, just tries to keep his breath steady, which by itself is already enough work. “Geordie and I have different approaches to what happened,” Halsey pauses, and Michael raises his eyebrows, with his eyes still closed. “Even if you take out of the equation that Jason aside, all of her kind in the south is dead, she still lost her parents and her best friend. Diana meant a lot to her.”

Michael holds his breath, just for practice.

If he focuses enough on his breath, he can almost zone out of what he’s listening to. 

“She thinks,” Halsey starts again, and he can hear the outrage in her voice this time. “She doesn’t… she doesn’t want to be here anymore. She wants to go north to try and find another village with humans. She doesn’t want to be in Death Valley.”

That makes Michael turn to her again, and he hopes his eyes show some sort of compassion, because hers only show hurt. “Will Jason come with?” he asks, just to have something to say other than how sorry he is. Halsey shrugs. 

Other than that, there’s not really much else to ask about other people.

Except.

He frowns a bit, feeling choked up all of sudden. “Did someone… Halsey, someone did tell Jack about Luke, right? He knows? It’s been a week. Tell me he knows.” 

Michael wishes there was a way to erase memories, but in a very selective way. He’d live all of the peace and quiet of being in locked rooms with Luke over and over again, and forget he ever held a gun and shot to kill, and that his magick opened up a hole in an Order witch’s chest once. He’d forget about the smell of blood and the weird fascination that took over him when he saw Ashton, in animal form, ripping apart the neck of the man who tortured him over the course of six months, but he’d live his and Luke’s first kiss on a loop.

He’d take away specific aspects of memories and make them better, too.

He’d make it so his first hug with Daryl wasn’t over his desperation of having lost Luke and Daryl’s of having lost control over the city he built and loves, but over the awkward joy of meeting for the first time someone you know you’re meant to trust. He’d make it so all of Karen’s hugs and kisses on cheek weren’t weighted down by the secret of his genes and nature, of being half-Chaos, and he’d make it so Calum and Maddy still had a place in his life, and maybe got along with everyone he loved and cherished. That included Luke, of course, but also Halsey, Geordie, Benji and Joel, Ashton, and in a strange way that made him feel uncomfortable but also at home, also Caleb, Jack, and though he didn’t know that much about them, Jason and Diana. Because they’d all be alive, in Michael’s selective memories.

And it would all work out. Painlessly. Beautifully.

He knows that’s not how life is supposed to be.

“I told him,” Halsey speaks, and she looks childlike and broken, if anything for a split second. “I told him,” she repeats, and then clears her throat. “Jack knows.”

* * *

This is the second worst place to be, and yet he only kicked his sheets as he rolled over the bed from one side to the other until he finally decided to leave the house, knowing he either went there, or would find no sleep at all. 

It’s the second worst place to be, because the first and absolute worse is in front of Luke’s name on the little place reserved for his body or what was left of it, in the first row of countless rows that equal forty-six deaths. Just looking over the direction of where that is, makes Michael feel like throwing up again. His body isn’t dealing well with this. He isn’t, period.

But this is the second worst place, because he’s standing in front of Nicole and Joel’s house, chewing on his bottom lip as he shifts his weight from one foot, to the other. His heart beats fast, keeps beating faster and faster, and though he never owned a watch since he was taken by the Order guards in front of all his classmates, he knows it’s late, because everyone’s long gone to bed, and no lights are on.

Grieving people don’t sleep, though. Not really.

Inside this house, he knows there’s more than Joel’s ghost, so much more that it’s smothering. There’s Dennis’ ghost that is everywhere even though he’s alive -- his strong presence and very hard eyes, his quietness and carefully selected words that easily made for punches --, the ghost of Tati’s cheerfulness, which was again, as present as the ghost of a dead person, and then there was Harry. Michael didn’t want to think of him, because even though his mother and sister were safe in the city, they were never really his the way Ashton was Harry’s. In a way, Harry had lost more than Michael: he’d lost everything.

Everything but his species. That would be Geordie and Jason.

Of course, he wasn’t there for the kids, or for the shadows that Joel would undoubtedly leave in all the rooms where he laughed the hardest and played with his children. 

He is there for Nicole.

Breathing in as much courage as he possibly can, he knocks on the door, shyly at first, but more forcefully once seconds follow with no response. Michael allows longer seconds to pass, his ears not serving him right to identify any noise in the house signaling anyone could be coming to answer the door. 

But eventually Nicole comes, in a T-shirt so big that it can only be Joel’s, and a pair of shorts. She’s barefeet, and it’s only looking at her own feet that Michael realizes that he is, too. Again, he had slipped out of bed and his mind and wandered the Death Valley streets with the soles of his feet touching the ground.

He finally releases his sore bottom lip, and at the same time, the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “Can I come in?” he asks, slowly, and she keeps looking at him for what feels like forever, until she finally nods and opens the door properly.

The house is all dark, so he doesn’t dare asking her to turn on the lights. Even in the dark, though, it looks just like Benji and Cameron’s house a few houses down the street, just slightly bigger, to accommodate the rooms of the children upstairs. He walks to the center of the living room, standing there a little lost, and she clicks the door closed. 

He doesn’t hear the click, but he imagines it.

It keeps him busy, imagining sounds he doesn’t experience often anymore.

“Do you want some tea, or,” she shrugs. Michael shakes his head, and she walks to him. She points at the couch first, so Michael sits, and then she takes the one across from him. “I was wondering how long ‘til you came,” she lifts her shoulders again, good heartedly this time.

In a way, she’s the same -- she always had the sharp edges and hard jaw and big eyes with arched eyebrows. She always had that unquestionable strength that threatened even when she categorically declared being on his side through what’s to come. But in other ways, in the details that Michael can’t miss even with the lights off, she’s an entirely different person.

She’s a small woman, a lot shorter than Michael, and thin, too. But the past week has made her thinner in a way that doesn’t look strong anymore. Her muscles are still there, but her face has thinned in a way that spells sadness; her eyes gotten baggy with what can only be crying. Michael thinks he’d recognize the same features in his face if he was concerned with mirrors lately. Which he most definitely wasn’t.

She crosses her legs, her fingers sliding down to the end of the T-shirt absentmindedly, like she doesn’t realize she’s started fidgeting with the seam. Michael tries his best to keep his eyes away.

“I needed to talk to you,” he starts, a bit nervously, and she nods, sighing softly. It’s meant to be reassuring, he thinks, but to his faulty ears it sounds annoyed and rushed. “I don’t-- I don’t want to cause any discomfort or pain.”

She smiles, the type of smile that isn’t really a smile.

“I’m in a lot of discomfort and pain right now. But you’re not the cause.”

Michael snorts. He doesn’t mean to, but it’s stronger than him. If only she knew about Karen and Erik Nijak, perhaps this conversation would be different. But she doesn’t, and he still needs to talk to her, so he clears his throat to mask the snort, and parts his lips to gain some courage.

“I met Dennis, the other day.”

“He’s sneaking out all the time,” Nicole says, her voice more amused now than bothered. Michael’s not sure whether she’s proud of him for managing to leave the house without her knowing or worried. Maybe both. “But he tells me about it later, most of the times. He told me he met you at the cemetery. I’m sorry about your hearing.”

Michael blinks a couple of times. 

Right. That.

“As I am about…” he trails off, gesturing widely. 

Everything. He’s sorry about Nicole losing the man she’s been with since she was younger than Michael. He’s sorry about Nicole having not only her two children, but also Harry, to deal with, all by herself. He’s sorry about Tati’s loss of hearing, too, and about Dennis losing his leg. He’s sorry that she looks so intent on being strong for the children, and he’s deeply sorry by how devastated she is. By how devastated he is, too. He’s just so, so sorry about everything.

“Dennis told me about a theory he has. That maybe Harry shares?” he tries, raising his eyebrows. She doesn’t seem like she’ll interrupt him, so he tries again, this time after breathing in and trying to sound more assertive. “It’s delusional. I know it is. They’re children and they need to believe their fantasies so it hurts less. I’m well aware that’s how children work with trauma.”

Nicole states, matter-of-factly: “Are you well aware that you’re too are a child?”

Michael pauses, the lump in his throat growing bigger. 

Chuckling lowly, he tilts his head to the side. “Anyway,” he starts over, and he thinks he sees the smallest of smiles on her lips, but doesn’t focus on that. “They’re younger than me. And they need to hold onto something, now that everything’s falling apart.”

Again, without showing any signs of being impressed or judgmental, she says: “Everything’s been falling apart for the past fifty years.”

Michael looks at her. She looks back at him. 

She’s making this awfully harder than it already is.

He won’t say it aloud, but since she asked, he does have a notion of the fact that he’s still a child himself. Maybe not in the most literal sense, closer to his twenties and young adulthood than he is to proper adolescence, but he does feel like a child, especially now, especially without Luke, especially so lost. He’s _well aware_ that he neglected his childhood in favor of feeling angry and confused all the time. First at Karen, for not letting him do things, for never taking him anywhere too public, at John for being dead. And then later, when he learned that he was half-Chaos, he spent all his next years hating Daryl for existing, and though he didn’t see it at the time, hating Karen for keeping him a secret. The same way you’d keep away a shameful mistake, he felt hidden. 

Ironically, it was only after being imprisoned for half a year that he felt the joys of childhood mixed with the confusion of teenage and the crushing doubt of adulthood. All at once. And he knows it’s more than just about Luke: it’s about self-discovery, and discovering the world in the process. It’s about relearning everything that he’s learned wrong in school. It’s about getting to know humans and Chaos witches and Order-born witches that walked away on their blood, just like that. It’s about getting past preconceived notions of prejudice and fear of the unknown. It’s about letting his magick come to him, all of it, without being terrified of the outcome. It’s about giving his father a chance, and entertaining the idea of family more than ever.

It’s about growing up and growing out of his shell.

That was all him.

But he had Luke to hold his hand through all of it. 

He’s still where Luke left him, only staring at his hand with nothing to hold, with a frown of perplexion on his face, without knowing where to go from now.

He knows he’s a child, in more ways than Nicole understands he does, and he also knows that things have been falling apart for quite some time. Maybe he doesn’t have all the historical details, but he can tell in the pain of people’s faces, how it never went away even when they were living good lives here at Death Valley.

But he doesn’t say any of that.

What he says is: “Do you think there’s a chance they’re still alive?”

Nicole considers this for a second, then pulls her legs up, and the T-shirt over them, in a childlike manner. Michael tries swallowing the lump in his throat again -- it’s hard seeing a woman like her looking choked up and innocent, sad and unsure, unconsciously holding onto a piece of clothing like it can make the clock work backwards. Michael wishes it could.

“I think the first thing anyone notices about Tati is her skin isn’t like most people’s,” she starts, frowning, and Michael looks away from her, ashamed of the first thoughts that really occurred to him when he first saw her daughter. “I know it’s more lizard skin than person skin. But it makes her a lot stronger than any of us, more resilient,” she pauses, and the corner of her mouth shapes into a smile. “My baby girl is nearly indestructible.”

Michael tries to smile at that. He can’t quite make his lips work into a smile, but it’s as close as he’ll get these days, and Nicole seems to take it with kindness.

“Her eardrums ruptured, I think. Her hearing is not all gone, and with the device it’ll be almost perfect, but she’s not in a very good place when it comes to her five basic senses right now,” she cocks an eyebrow, her face changing, and even in the dark, Michael can see the clear message on her face: how she wishes it had been her instead of Tati. But then she goes on: “But that’s because her hearing was always the most delicate. She didn’t lose consciousness after the explosion.”

Michael takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry she saw what she saw.”

“Don’t.”

What he’d intended was to show sympathy, but there’s no use for that in this household, as there never was, apparently. Nicole shifts a bit uncomfortably across from him where she’s sitting, bringing her legs down, crossing them, and she looks like a teenager, even though she’s at least twice Michael’s age.

“She thinks she saw something. A man with dark long wings, collecting bodies,” she rolls her eyes, her voice becoming different, thicker, a mix between mockery and that breaking point when voices crack. Michael frowns, blinking a couple of times, leaning closer by instinct. “A winged man and a woman who kept disappearing. How’s that? She probably hallucinated it.”

His heart stops. 

It must stop, because he feels like the world does too.

“A woman who kept disappearing, Nicole?” he asks. She nods, absentmindedly, but she looks like she may cry. Michael can’t tell whether she’s sad because Tati could be seeing things that weren’t there, or because she just is devastated about everything. “What did Tati say about this woman?” 

She smirks up at him. “I thought the man with the wings would catch your attention instead.”

He shakes his head. “Please tell me what she told you. The woman?”

Nicole sighs, and again adjusts herself so she’s more comfortable, or as close to that as she can be. She grabs her ankles, rounding forward as if she could protect herself from the outside world, or from what’s inside. “Said it was the woman who was guiding him around. The man had black wings and she’d never seen him before, but she said the woman looked familiar, though she couldn’t remember from where, because her face kept disappearing in thin air,” she snorts, as if the ridiculousness of it catches up to her. She takes a deep breath, and resumes talking: “I don’t know what she meant by that. Tati said they both flew, but while he batted his wings, for her it was like she just floated.” 

His heart has surely gone back to beating, only it’s climbing his throat.

He can feel his heartbeats in his veins, in every inch of his body. He can feel the tension making his shoulders ache and his neck, especially on the stitches, burn. He was supposed to have gone to Daryl to get the stitches removed today, but he couldn’t have possibly brought himself to let anyone touch his neck just yet.

“Like her body was made of vapor?” he tries, raising his eyebrows.

Nicole shrugs. “I suppose?” 

Michael stares at her. The familiar burning in his eyes makes his whole face tired, like he can’t take any more crying, and yet there’s always room for more. He’d entertained before, the thought of dehydration, crying himself to proper death, but even in his head it had sounded like something melodramatic and that Luke would have rolled his eyes to. 

“She may have dreamed the whole thing up,” she adds, and with a long sigh, “I didn’t ask her how many bodies she saw, how many people she saw struggling to get out of the debris and just choking to death. I didn’t want to know.”

Michael’s not listening anymore. His mind is racing.

He sinks his teeth on his bottom lip, giving Nicole a long look, and without having registered the last of what she said, he asks: “Tati saw the woman and the man take dead bodies, or bodies of people who were still alive? Nicole, please, what did Tati see?”

Nicole gives him a long look, like she either pities him senseless or is impressed by him. Either would take Michael nowhere, so instead he just keeps on holding his breath, trying to stop his teeth from coming back to his already sore lip. 

“I don’t know. I don’t think she does, either.” 

Michael sighs heavily, letting his body sink on the couch, and runs his hands over his head. He accidentally reaches the cut on his right ear, and it shoots a sharp pain down his spine. He jerks to the side a bit, because that’s his knee-jerk response, just like tearing up and missing Luke desperately. 

“They can still be alive. Everyone.”

“Not everyone,” she adds, but it’s absent minded, like her thoughts are elsewhere. She’s not looking at him anymore.

“Who knows how many people they took? Everyone who lived near the house was attending the party. Nobody saw anything. They could have gone back to take more and more and more.” His voice raises, a sudden burst of energy making his chest grow. “Maybe Joel’s still alive, Nic.”

He’d never called her Nic before. He doesn’t know why he does now.

She looks at him, in the dark of her living room, the saddest of smiles he’s ever seen, even worse than his reflection on the bowls of soup have shown him when he tried to smile to please Daryl or Halsey in dinners or lunches these last few days. Rawest than everything, and carrying a certain brutality, for a second there she just smiles at him. Then something breaks, and she shakes her head slowly.

“No. Benji couldn’t, so I… I identified the body. What was left of it. He’s dead.”

It’s like receiving the news all over again. It brings tears to his eyes that have no business staying in his eyes. They roll down his cheeks, hot and anything but shy. He sniffs, because it comes too fast and abruptly, and chuckles lowly, shaking his head too. Not because it’s funny, but because it’s so damn painful that he doesn’t know how else to react.

“That’s… I can’t believe this.”

But he can. He does. 

Nicole sighs, licking her lips and looking away from him. “Benji’s not doing well. He was the one who wanted to fight, to be by Daryl’s side again in war. Joel just wanted to keep his family safe. And then Benji lives, unscattered except for a few bruises, and Joel’s just… not around anymore. Cameron’s been trying to get him to speak, but he hasn’t, so far not a word. He’s not talking, he’s not eating. I don’t think he’s sleeping, either.”

Michael stands up from his couch, walks to hers, and wordlessly, sits beside her. She leans into him, dropping her head to his shoulder, and he wraps an arm around her. He’s bigger than her, and she’s even more broken than he is, because for her there’s not even the vague possibility of hope. Still, he cries and she doesn’t, maybe because she’s already been crying enough.

He holds her to make sure she’s still in one piece, and he cries because it makes him feel like he isn’t. Eventually, though, she says, with her voice very small: “You have to get out of here.”

Michael immediately looks at her, sniffing once more. “Of your house? I’m sorry that--”

“No, of Death Valley,” she raises her head from his shoulder, looking at him very seriously. 

He chews on his bottom lip some more. 

Up close, she looks somehow even thinner. He wants to hug her again, tell her that she’s a fantastic mother, that Michael’s sure of it, and that the fact that she’s trained most warriors that came from Death Valley to be able to defend themselves speaks more about her than about the war. He wants to say that Joel will always love her, even if he’s dead and gone forever, and that he’d understand anyone who would ever love her forever, Tati and Dennis, and also Harry, who has a mother who’s alive but isn’t making sure he eats well like he’s sure Nicole is.

Instead, he asks: “So you believe Tati’s story is real, and I should try to find whoever could still be alive?” And then, he adds, with his eyes: _That Luke’s still alive? That I can maybe bring Ashton back to Harry, too?_

Nicole sighs softly.

“I believe that you will believe it, and that you’ll leave.”

Cameron’s visions, courtesy of The Trinity. Making sure she knows by Michael’s haircut, courtesy of Harry, that he wouldn’t stay in Death Valley that long. That he would leave, courtesy of a desperate need to cling to hope, and try to find a way to keep breathing. 

Michael looks at her. “And you don’t think I’ll come back.”

“You won’t, not before the grand finale of our lives,” she gives him a weak smile, because she doesn’t know if she will make it, but somehow that’s not important, as long as at least one of her children does. “Look,” she says, quietly, so quietly he doesn’t hear it, just sees her mouth moving, and then she’s turning her palm up, so he can see it.

He does, and then back at her face, when nothing happens. She’s taking a deep breath, and when she releases her breath through her mouth, she opens her eyes once more, and they’re all black. From the center of her palm emerges what at first looks like a diamond, and then, surely, becomes a small spear of sorts, only it’s made of ice. Michael swallows back his heart, staring at the magick so close to him, and feels a shiver run down his spine with the proximity to the cold. The ice emerges tall and solid from the palm of her hand, and then when her eyes blink back, they melt into the palm of her hand like water, only it’s not wet when she closes and opens her fist.

“My…” he starts, a little hypnotized, and then blinks a couple of times, clearing his throat. “My Mom can control water. But she’s Order.”

Nicole nods, distractedly, turning her hand around as if to make sure it’s completely back to normal. “Yeah, Order can’t summon elements, but Order magick can control them. Here’s to hoping I don’t go hand-to-hand combat with your momma, ‘cause that won’t end right for me,” she laughs, low and dry, and Michael half-smiles, because he doesn’t know what else to do. “After you leave, it won’t be long for Daryl to come to me, to Benji, to Cameron, to anyone who can fight and ask for a small army of vengeful witches. He’ll retaliate whoever there is to retaliate. And I’ll be by his side, until I see you. Then I’m on your team, and everything changes,” she pauses, frowning a bit with the seriousness of what she’s saying, and leaning closer to him, so he can’t look away. “I want you to know, right now, that if I die there, I will have chosen this.”

Michael narrows his eyes and lowers his face a little, so they’re on eye-level. “And I want you to know, right now, that you won’t. You won’t die, not because I don’t want you to,” he presses his lips together, sniffing again, his eyes welling up again with the promise. “But because your children need you, and your brother-in-law needs you, and everyone who knows you needs you to, and you need a chance to need them back.”

For what feels like a long time, she just looks at him.

Then she chuckles lowly and shakes her head, adjusting herself so her head is against his shoulder again, and she’s looking ahead. Michael’s a little confused, but he follows suit, putting his arm around her shoulders once more. His crying silences fast, and she takes a deep, deep breath, laughing quietly to herself again, this time not sounding quite as bitter as before:

“You’re not a bad kid. I hope you can get what you need most.”

Michael presses his lips together to keep the words from clumsily falling out.

He realizes that her choice of words must’ve been very conscious -- that what she wishes for Michael is that he gets what he needs, and not what he wants. He realizes there’s an enormous difference, too, though right now it feels like there isn’t. 

Right now, every arrow points to the same direction. 

After a moment, she asks: “Do you know where to go?”

Michael takes a deep breath. “Not yet. But I know who can tell me.”

* * *

Though Michael doesn’t sleep much, it’s the first night free of nightmares since he woke up partially deaf and with his neck stitched up. He wakes up to find Daryl in the small living room area, with a cold cloth pressed to the burned side of his face, with a book open on his lap.

Michael sits next to him wordlessly, and part of him wants to share.

There’s this thing vibrating inside him, stopping him from accepting the version of the truth he was handed, and he needs to share that with his father; let him know that he doesn’t need to give long looks Michael’s way and make sure he eats and showers and does basic things that he wasn’t doing. Michael needs to tell him that he’s found some hope of his own.

But he doesn’t.

Not before he knows for sure.

After a while, Daryl puts the cold cloth away, and closes his book, giving Michael the quietest little smile. “You okay?” 

He doesn’t hear it as much as he reads Daryl’s lips in the simple question. It’s a bad morning for his hearing, and it feels like he’s sitting in the center of a big gymnasium, with whispers being echoed unintelligibly all around him.

Michael returns the smile in the same fashion. “I should be asking you. You’re the one with the,” he points towards the piece of cloth, and Daryl gives him a blank look. “Are you having fevers? Should you get that looked over?”

Daryl says something, but this time it’s longer than two words, and Michael doesn’t catch it. His confusion must translate, because Daryl clears his throat, already louder than he was, and says, matter-of-factly: “I am sorry. I shouldn’t speak so quietly.”

Michael considers this.

It makes his mind go to bad places, so he just shakes his head.

Daryl must understand, because he seems to change routes of the entire conversation. In a loud enough tone that it comes fragmented but clear enough to Michael’s ears, he says: “How do you like the new house? I know it’s not as big as the other one, but--”

Interrupting him, Michael touches his arm. He tries to smile again, saying: “I like it.”

Daryl gives him an alarmed look, like something about this shocks him, even though he tries so badly to mask it. Michael doesn’t know whether it’s the touch -- though he wouldn’t say it’s that, not after the past week -- or the willingness to make a positive comment. Daryl must see it as progress, his grieving slowly leaving, which only makes Michael want to tell him all the more. 

Instead he asks: “Have you seen Benji after what happened?” The response is a heavy sigh, Daryl shaking his head no, and it makes Michael quickly add: “I can only imagine what he must be feeling. Because of Joel. Because of… because of everything.”

“He’s not talking,” Daryl says, as if that settles it.

It does, in a way. It makes Michael feel a little sick in his stomach, even though this is not news; Nicole had already told him. So he just nods and looks ahead, and just like that, they’re done with the conversation, but not with each other. Michael takes the book from between them on the old beat couch. It’s _Frankenstein_ by Mary Shelley. The title makes him smile quietly, leaning back, and examining the old copy, undoubtedly from centuries earlier.

“Think she was a witch?” he muses out loud.

“Definitely Chaos,” Daryl states, cocking an eyebrow, as if the suggestion of anything different would be offensive. Michael chuckles lowly, and it’s not a half-assed attempt.

It’s real.

* * *

There’s a weight on his shoulders that he can’t quite put into words as he makes his way there. It’s right after lunch, and Halsey kept looking at him weirdly, like she could tell there was something up, but the reason he couldn’t share his hope with her was different than why he couldn’t with Daryl. It wasn’t only because he wasn’t sure -- it wasn’t even half of the reason why. It had to do with how dismissive she was and would be again, and he couldn’t risk losing the little hope he had himself. He couldn’t risk it evaporating. 

And then there was the other reason, what Cameron had seen, and the part that hurt the most.

Either way, she ended up not asking any questions, just indulging Daryl in whatever topics he brought up. They mostly talked about Jeremiah, who’d went away a few days after the explosion to try and find more medication for the wounded, and still hadn’t returned. The conversation didn’t feel heavy with concern and conspiracy, though, or at least not to Michael’s only half-there hearing. His head was elsewhere, too.

His head was where his feet now lead him.

The weight on his shoulders is more than hope being put to test. 

He knows it’s a bad idea to go there, but he doesn’t have any other choice.

With his heart on his throat and his fists clenched in tension, he stops in front of the door to Jack’s laboratory. It’s ajar, and knowing of his low chances to be invited in if he properly knocks, he breathes in all the courage that can fill his lungs, just like he did last night in front of Nicole’s door, holds his breath, with his objectives clear in sight, and walks in the room.

The place is far away enough from where the Big House used to be that it can’t by any means have been affected by the explosion itself, and yet it looks like it was. There are pieces of broken glass scattered all over the floor, stains on the walls that probably mean Jack’s thrown several liquid things at it. There’s a heavy-looking briefcase -- Luke’s, Michael recognizes -- split in two on the floor. 

Jack’s sitting on his desk, though, his back to Michael.

He must hear the footsteps, because he impulses his feet away from the desk, so he’ll see who’s visiting him. On the desk there’s something that looks an awful lot like a robotic leg. On Jack’s hand is a much smaller version of Luke’s blow-torch, or what looks like it anyway. Less of a gun, more of a tool.

They lock eyes for a second, and Michael can feel his shoulders tensing more.

Jack narrows his eyes, and a single word leaves his mouth, quiet enough that Michael doesn’t hear it, but his mouth and expression make it obvious enough. “Out.”

Michael takes another deep breath, and sinks his teeth to his bottom lip. He clears his throat, the uneasiness making his bones grow heavier. Something crawls up his throat, and he tastes bile in his mouth. Being near Jack is difficult for so many reasons; the hatred and the red eyes are bad, surely, but he also looks so much like him. Like Luke.

“Is that,” he starts, and then pauses. He clears his throat, trying to be firmer, and points at the desk of what Jack had been working on. “Is that a prosthetic leg for Dennis?”

Jack’s still holding the tool with fire coming from it. He’s not wearing protective gloves, or a mask, or anything to make himself protected against it. He squints his eyes, says: “Get out,” and it’s loud enough that Michael can hear it, and register the heaviness of it.

But he doesn’t. He takes a deep breath, and says: “It looks cool. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

Slamming the thing against the desk comes so soon that Michael isn’t even sure that Jack turns it off first. Michael flinches back, frowning, his face closing with how abrupt it is. Jack stands up, pointing at the door with one finger that shakes a little.

“I told you to get the fuck outta here!” he yells. Michael parts his lips, tries to say something, whatever that can stop him from registering just how much of a negative effect he has on Jack now, but it’s no use. Jack starts his way, that finger still shaking in his direction as he tries to point, yelling: “I never want to see your fucking face again, Michael!”

Michael shakes his head no, and what he can come up with is: “It wasn’t my fault!”

And that’s how he understands, that past the self-inflicted guilt or the attempt for that, his innocence remains intact to an extent. He only claims full responsibility for the two lives he’s taken with a gun and his magick. The realization could very well lift the crushing weight off his shoulders, wash his hands from all the blood, but it’s not the best time for epiphanies.

He swallows back his failing his heart, but his mouth still tastes to bile.

Jack charges towards him faster than, with his face transformed into an uglier version of the kindest traces that Luke ever had and they shared. If Michael squinted, maybe he’d see Luke, but all there is to it is Jack and his closed fist connecting to Michael’s face.

First he hisses with the jolt of pain. The blow hits him on the left side of his jaw, and his hands come to protect his face as he nearly loses balance. He drops his head back, holding his jaw, swearing under his breath.

Jack’s standing in front of him, out of breath and choked up.

“Don’t you dare say it’s not your fault. It is your fault. Anything bad that’s ever happened to us is your fault. If it wasn’t for you and the stupid fucking prophecy, we’d never have come close of this doomed city and all the fuck up that came with it!”

Michael snorts, shaking his head, even though it hurts his jaw more. 

There’s nothing in this world that Luke loved more than Death Valley.

Loves. Maybe loves.

He screws his eyes shut, both of his hands holding the side of his jaw. He’s gritting his teeth and trying to stop himself from doing it at the same time. In front of him, lowering his head to come to eye-level with him, Jack says:

“Get out of here, Michael. Now.”

He isn’t yelling anymore. It’s almost like pleading.

But Michael hasn’t done what he’s there to do yet.

Taking a deep breath, he raises his head to look at him. His lips part, and his jaw still throbs with pain, so it takes him a moment. Jack’s eyes have welled up, but he doesn’t look sad. He looks angry, out of his element, terrified and, at the same time, at his bravest. 

Licking his lips, he buys some time, sighing and saying: “I need to talk to you.”

“No,” he starts shaking his head, the tears growing fatter than his eyes can hold, the no’s getting all caught up in his throat before he can utter them. They still come mutely, several times, or maybe it’s just that Michael’s hearing isn’t good enough to catch them. It doesn’t matter. This is Jack shaking his head repeatedly and letting rage fill all the space that Luke left. “You don’t get to need anything, alright? You lived, and he died, and that’s the most unfair thing that’s ever happened.” 

Michael doesn’t have an argument for that.

All he does have, and the only thing that rings true and that he’d hope would ring true for Jack as well is: “I love him, Jack,” and that’s not the right thing to say, either.

The mention of the word love seems to make Jack cringe. His fist comes flying once more, more forcefully this time, a punch on his stomach that makes him fall backward, his head hitting the floor before the pain on his stomach registers. He throws his head back, the pain coming like a burning and a jolt at the same time. It feels numbing, more than painful, because the worst part isn’t that it doesn’t stop there, that Jack goes down with him, that he hits his jaw again, and again, and again, but that he speaks loud and clear while he does it.

“You ruined everything! You came and ruined everything!” he yells, and he’s crying hard, but his fists don’t stop, the inside of his mouth breaking between his teeth and Jack’s fist, the blood collecting in his mouth as another hit comes on the side of his jaw once more, and his head lolls to the side. “You should be dead! You should be fucking dead! Not Luke. You!”

Michael doesn’t fight it.

His arms lie by his sides as tears of pain start collecting, and when it stops, as sudden and, in its rawness, brutally broken, a blurry version of Jack’s kneeling on top of him, one of his knees pressing in a way that hurts against Michael’s right arm.

Jack’s breathing hard, crying hard, and when Michael blinks away the tears and Jack’s image comes into focus, Jack adds, in a quieter tone:

“I should be dead. Not him.”

Michael turns his head to the side, and spits the blood on the floor. 

He thinks it’s maybe his body telling him to stop whatever it is that he’s getting himself into -- that the stitches on his neck start to burn against his skin, that the cut on his ear makes his whole head throb. His jaw is numb instead, the pain too big and at the same time, too irrelevant.

His stomach hurts the most, he thinks, even though it was only hit once. His hands go there as the thought occurs, and he shuts his eyes, trying to steady his breath, to no success.

Jack gets off him, sitting next to him and hugging his legs. His crying’s gotten worse in the few seconds it’s taken Michael to regain full awareness of his surroundings. Michael takes a deep breath, opening his eyes and staring at the ceiling. Jack’s either mumbling or crying more loudly, but either way, Michael can’t make out the sounds.

He closes his eyes for a second, trying to remove the physical pain, and also the emotional.

He tries to remove everything from his head, and opens his eyes. He moves to sit down, but a pain shoots up his spine and makes him wince, a cry escaping his lips with moving his head, an exploding headache making it hard to keep balance. Still he manages to keep on breathing, like Luke would tell him to, and slowly he stands up. 

Jack doesn’t stop him, but doesn’t say a word, either.

Michael closes his eyes for another second when he finds himself on his feet. His hand is still pressed to his stomach, as if that somehow could help, and then with a lot of effort, he takes his hand away, bringing both of them to his face. He resists the urge to touch all the sore spots, and goes for his eyebrow instead.

He unrolls one of the little balls of his piercing, and removing it, puts the little ball back.

The memories from when he first got the jewelry flash before his eyes, bringing him shivers that he’s not ready to deal with. His eyes are burning from all the crying, but just like the mourning never sleep, they never really stop crying, either. Michael sets his jaw, pushing the memories away, and finally turns to Jack, still sitting on the floor, watching him quietly and with a frown.

Michael presses his lips together for a moment, looking back at the thing, rolling it between his fingers that have somehow become bloody. And then he comes closer to Jack, and taking his hand against his attempt of yanking it back, Michael presses the black piercing to his palm.

Jack’s frown deepens, and with some difficulty, Michael takes a step back.

“I’m not saying this will lead anywhere. If it turns out that the results point out to Death Valley, then I am wrong and delusional. But if it points to anywhere, anywhere else…” his voice cracks, and a sad smile comes to his lips. “You melted a tracker into the metal of Luke’s lip ring. He divided it to make my piercing, so he could find me if someone took me,” he pauses, looking at his dead boyfriend’s brother. “Jack, it’s time to find Luke.”


	33. you wait in the dark for the music to soothe you to sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUYS YOU WON'T BELIEVE THIS. the very very talented blackwaterlilies drew [gender-bend!opia](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/137767467045/blackwaterlilies-when-you-are-avoiding-life-so)!!!!! i'm so in love with her michael, but truly they're all so beautiful!!! *__________* you should totally check it out!
> 
> bit of a shorter update, but hopefully still fun! hope you enjoy it! *w*

Blinking blankly at the piece of jewelry in his hands, Jack doesn’t really react for what feels like forever. Sitting on the floor, the sobs still making him choke up, he stares and stares at the thing, rolling it between his fingers, the frown growing deeper by the second. Michael doesn’t leave just yet, can’t before he knows Jack understands.

Very slowly, with his tone confused and small, tone of voice so quiet that Michael barely hears it, he raises his head, until his eyes meet Michael’s. “He could be alive?”

His head is throbbing; he can feel the swelling start. Michael turns his head away, and spits some more blood on the floor. His vision is blurry and his hearing is more full of echoes than usual, but he still puts an effort into at least trying to hold himself up, looking as presentable as he can. Holding his stomach where he was punched, he says: “Maybe. Not only him, either.”

Something passes Jack’s eyes. 

The confusion seems to quickly become hope, something shining light in all his darkest corners. His eyes start welling up again, fat tears rolling down his cheeks in no time, but it isn’t the desperate crying from before. Sitting on his legs on the floor, he stares up at Michael, like he hadn’t been beating him up a minute ago. Like Michael’s the messenger of the best news. Like Michael could save him, just like he’s been predicted to save all of Chaos.

“Joel, too?” 

Michael doesn’t think twice about it. “Yes, maybe Joel too,” he says.

Jack closes his fist around the piercing, and his bottom lip quivers, but it’s like he’s biting back a smile this time. Michael doesn’t feel guilty about it, though he probably should -- all he knows is that right now, they need each other, so he’ll do what he has to.

He takes a deep breath, and it hurts his chest and lungs so, so much, that he winces, looking away. Jack doesn’t apologize for that, either.

“How long until you can track it?” 

“Not it,” Jack says, opening his palm again to look at the thing in amazement. He sniffs, tries to stop himself from crying. “Him. Them.”

“No, it,” he frowns. “You’re tracking another piece of metal. It may lead to bodies, and you have to be aware of that,” Michael tells him, with his tone as firm as he manages, considering he isn’t fully aware of that himself.

“A few days, I don’t know.” Jack just gestures dismissively, as if he’s done listening to Michael and he should leave. 

He should, and he will. 

Michael turns to the door, trying to stop his breath from being too deep, because if his chest rises, it hurts worse. Before he does leave, though, he needs to say one more thing. “But Jack?” he asks. Jack’s listening, but doesn’t get up. Michael’s back is turned to him now, and he doesn’t look over his shoulder, either. “Finish Dennis’ leg.”

There’s silence for a second.

And then: “I will.”

* * *

Michael doesn’t know how he manages to make it back to the house he’s staying with Daryl and Halsey. It’s way further south than the Big House used to be, and the walk must take around twenty minutes, which, to his current condition, feels like forever. The pain in his stomach added to the lack of balance that the lack of half his ear gives him has him limping a little after the first few minutes walking. It’s the afternoon, and the few people out in the streets give him strange looks. It must be disconcerting, watching their Prince and supposed savior with a punched face and bloody lips, crawling back to where he was supposed to be.

Or maybe that’s not how they look at him at all, but he’s too numbed to meet their eyes, so that’s what he makes of it anyway.

Halsey’s sitting on the front porch, with an enormous gun in her hands. She’s polishing it absentmindedly, and doesn’t seem to notice Michael coming closer until he’s standing right in front of her, giving her an apologetic smile, because if she doesn’t move, he can’t get in.

“Jesus Christ, Michael,” she frowns, putting the gun down and standing up to meet him. “What happened to you?!”

He wishes he could pretend like he’s forgotten, and doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It must sound like he chuckles lowly, but instead he’s coughing, the vibrant aching in his jaw making it painful to try to talk, but the willingness anyway making for more pain. He licks his teeth and turns away from her, spitting blood for the third time in the past half hour. Halsey touches his shoulder tentatively, and he realizes he’s dropped his head between his shoulders. He raises his head, looking at her.

“Jack,” he says, trying to smile.

It’d be no use to lie, anyway.

She nods, like she understands, and he’s glad she doesn’t ask any more questions. “C’mon in, before Daryl gets home,” she says, putting an arm under his shoulders to help him. 

She’s strong enough that it helps considerably, like he’s sharing his own weight with someone else. She does position herself on his right side, though, and when she says something, even though it’s close to his ear, he still hears only the distant mumbling that his other ear catches. He blinks a couple of times and hums in agreement anyway, because he’s growing more tired by the second, and he needs to lie down.

Michael’s not sure how come they get to his room, but they do. He drops on the bed and feels like his head might explode. He reaches to touch his jaw, shutting his eyes. Halsey says something he doesn’t catch, still more directed to his right side, and then leaves. Michael coughs; doesn’t need to spit out blood but still feels the insides of his cheeks all cut and sore against his teeth. He coughs again, and this time he has to take his hands to his abdomen, the place there hurting suddenly way too much.

He tries turning on his side, but lying against his ear and stitched up neck doesn’t work. 

Halsey comes back and, wordlessly, she sits beside him. She’s brought things; a cold cloth that she presses to his face as he closes his eyes again, less like screwing them shut and more softly this time. She’s probably cleaning his face, or trying to help with the swelling. Michael doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. All he knows is that it helps a little, so he relaxes against her touch, and lets himself be helped.

She says something quietly that he doesn’t get, and her stare is hard enough that he feels it, opens his eyes and blinks a couple of times. She’s glaring at him, like she’s mad that he isn’t answering. Michael takes a deep breath, even though it hurts his lungs. “Halsey, I don’t hear a word you’re saying.”

He points to his other ear, on his other side.

Halsey blushes, parting her lips. Michael doesn’t remember seeing her actually blush, not even when he accidentally walked in on her and Geordie. It’s more than just embarrassment that takes for her cheeks to grow pink -- it’s shame. And he almost feels guilty for making her feel ashamed, but he’s too tired and hurt and he just wants for his head to stop aching so he can sleep for a bit, so he doesn’t apologize for the blushing on her part, like maybe he would’ve in another occasion.

She looks away from him, saying more firmly and loudly: “I’m sorry,” and then she stands up and walks around, so she’s sitting on his other side. He barely moves, just enough that she can keep helping him, and he thinks he may nod, or maybe just thought of nodding, but either way she talks again, this time louder and closer to his left ear: “What I was saying is that you can’t tell Daryl it was Jack who did this. He won’t accept it.”

Michael tries shrugging, but that sort of hurts too.

“Say you were going for a walk, and some people you don’t know cornered you, blamed you for the explosion and beat you up,” she says, easily, like that’s entirely plausible. Michael looks at her, and his question may be visible for her, because her look changes. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone blames you really for the fact that it happened, but these people have high expectations on what you can do. They all know about your magick.”

Sighing heavily, he feels himself sink on the bed.

“Alright. I’ll blame faceless nameless people.”

Halsey chuckles lowly, though she doesn’t seem like she found it funny.

“I brought these pills for you,” she says, taking something from her pocket. “This one here is for the pain. It’s supposed to help you sleep, too. This one here has caffeine, so take it when you wake up next,” she puts one in his hand, the other on the bedside table. Michael nods, throwing the first pill in his mouth. It tastes bitter, but not worse than blood, and he swallows the thing. She gives him a weird look. “I was going to give you water to go with that.”

Michael shrugs. 

“I used to have a friend,” he starts, blinking slowly, and Halsey raises her eyebrows, pressing the cold cloth against his jaw. In the lack of ice, it’s just soothing enough that it feels like it stops throbbing. “Maddy,” he says, meeting her eyes, as if that makes a difference. It doesn’t, and she continues to look at him the same way. “Once I got in a fight with some seniors in school. She took care of me too, sort of.”

Halsey gives him a funny look. “Sort of?”

“Yeah,” he smiles quietly, closing his eyes for a second. “She yelled a lot. My friend Calum was angry, but mostly he was scared. He wanted me to tell Mom or the principal. But Maddy just wanted me to point to whoever had given me a black eye, because then she’d end them.” He pauses, opens his eyes again. “Didn’t do much for the black eye itself, though.”

Chuckling lowly, Halsey’s eyes turn fond, as if they’ve never encountered war, and Michael likes it when her eyes look like this. “Do you miss them?” she asks.

It’s a good-natured question that deserves a reply that’s neither sarcastic nor accompanied by a glare. Michael does the best he can with that, cocking an eyebrow and saying: “Well, they didn’t love the fact that I lied to them all our lives, and I’m half-Chaos.” But Halsey just stares at him blankly, because that wasn’t what she had asked. He presses his lips together in a thin line, then rolls his eyes, and relaxes again under her touch, not really realizing he’d tensed up. “I do.” 

“It’s alright that you do,” Halsey shrugs, her voice quietening to just above a whisper, or at least to Michael’s ear that’s what it sounds like. She sounds like she doesn’t know what to say next.

Maybe just to fill in the silence, he says: “It doesn’t matter, though. By the time I was arrested, Maddy wasn’t talking to me anymore, and Calum was, but it was weird. I think he could tell. He was involved in the arrest anyway, must’ve been. I used to think about it more, but now I’m thinking about it again.”

Halsey’s quiet, or maybe she says something he doesn’t hear. He frowns and keeps his eyes down, so he’s not interrupted, not even by her eyes.

“With Maddy it was just-- it was so fucking stupid, Halsey. I never even told them I was happy for them, because I wasn’t,” he shrugs again, and feels his eyes welling up just a bit, but not enough to cry. He is his knee-jerk reaction, and to Calum and Maddy, his knee-jerk reaction is crushing guilt and a hint of nostalgia. “They started dating. They never excluded me from our little bubble, but I felt left out anyway. I tried to end it in any way I could. I hit on her, and she hated me for it, so I kissed Calum, and he punched me in the face.”

He snorts.

Maybe it’s the pill, but he finds funny saying it out loud.

Halsey’s silence grows longer, so he looks at her. She seems concerned. “Why did you do it?”

“Because she was pretty. Because I loved him,” he says, and they’re both true, but they’re also neither the answer she was looking for, nor the true one anyway. Michael chews on the insides of his mouth for another second, taking a deep breath and adjusting himself a bit so his neck doesn’t feel angled so wrong. Looking up, he admits the truth: “I couldn’t stand it that they were happy and I wasn’t.”

“Yeah, I get that,” she says, and removes the cloth from his face, giving him a hard look.

For a second, he thinks he’ll get more, but then he realizes, maybe she’s talking about him. When he came to Death Vale, and she was no longer the princess, and nobody cared for the Head Champion that couldn’t take them out of the city alive. The savior they had dreamed of had arrived, and with a boyfriend around his arm. Michael was happy, and she was miserable. 

Michael can see why he’d be perfectly hateable.

Sighing softly, he looks away from her again. “Well,” he says, and chuckles a bit.

She chuckles too. Apparently their shared ugliness is good for laughs now, between just the two of them, in the darkness of Michael’s new tiny bedroom.

It feels like hours pass after that, or maybe it’s just Michael’s tired beat body starting to give in to sleepiness and the fabricated relaxation of the pill. He’s about to drift off when Halsey’s voice comes again, unsure but curious: “What happened to the boy?”

In the maze that’s become of Michael’s head, he finds it hard to find himself and much more difficult, answers. He blinks a couple of times to shoo away sleep, and then frowns. The boy is Luke, and the boy is dead but maybe not really, and he needs the boy to not be dead. But what happened to him is beyond him. Maybe taken by a witch made of vapor that can turn her eyes black and white, but is not like him at all, and a man with wings. Michael doesn’t know what they could possibly want with Luke, and hopefully more that are still alive, but he knows nothing good. Michael considers what Daryl had told him and them, when he had Luke in his arms, and Luke was first finding out about having his memory altered to forget his encounter with the woman. Daryl had said the same had happened to Michael, but he didn’t remember that, either.

He almost tells Halsey that, but when he raises his eyes to hers and her curiosity mixed with uncertainty is still there, he sees something else in her eyes: the lack of hope. And he understands that this can’t be the boy she meant.

Back in his head, it takes him a few more seconds to come up with an answer.

“Calum,” he says, then breathes in as much as he can, like the name weighs too much in his tongue and he has to make up for it somehow. “His sister was in the military -- or is, I don’t know. I never sold it to her, that I was normal.”

“You are,” Halsey contributes, shrugging.

“I’m not,” he smiles, but it hurts his jaw so he stops. “She’d been suspecting of me for a while, I could tell, but what the fuck was I supposed to do? Then he goes and gives me my skateboard, and I explode it. I thought a lot about it like I said, and that wouldn’t have happened if it was just the ordinary object it always was. I had my Chaos magick buried down and under control. I think there was something in there that triggered the magick without my consent, without my even thinking about it,” he pauses, closes his eyes again, trying to go for softly but not being able to avoid the frown on his face. “He looked at me like I’d betrayed him. And I had.”

Halsey doesn’t respond.

He adds: “I keep hoping maybe he did it just to prove his sister wrong. Maybe he was so sure that I was like him that he did it so she’d trust me already. But that’s not what happened. He got lost in the crowd and the guards closed in on me.” 

Just like Calum had gotten lost in the crowd that day, he finds himself getting lost in the maze of his head once more. He gives Halsey another look, feeling a bit groggy from the pill, and her eyes manage to be both hard and soft at the same time. She doesn’t do hope, he sees, but at the same time, there’s the desperate desire for that. 

In his head, lost in the maze, he presses his hands to stone walls and murmurs words that won’t come out of her mouth, like that one day it’ll be alright, and that he’ll stop feeling like things are falling apart, and that he’ll find Luke, and that maybe one day he’ll find Calum and Maddy too, and say that he’s sorry, and say that he misses them, and introduce them to a world where they can both still love him in the best way they ever could, that was enough for the longest time.

But in reality, Halsey says nothing.

Michael turns on his side, blocking his sole source of hearing almost completely against the pillow. Halsey seems to get it, because she doesn’t stop him or try to talk, just stays with him until he closes his eyes and, eventually, falls asleep.

* * *

Daryl doesn’t seem to buy the story Michael and Halsey feed him, hours later, but it’s enough that he doesn’t ask any questions. Either way, he seems more preoccupied with letting Michael know it’s time to remove the stitches. There’s a long pause after he says it, and Michael presses his lips together so tightly he ends up biting the insides of his already hurt mouth, and he has to excuse himself from the kitchen because there’s blood in his mouth he needs to spit.

All in all, the surprising part is that he says, “Excuse me,” before leaving.

He didn’t use to do that a lot with Karen, but then again, thinking about her makes him feel things he isn’t ready to deal with yet. 

Later, when Daryl does come to remove his stitches, Michael doesn’t cry. He does wince lots though, and feels his body reacting against the touch, but he tries to stay still because Daryl’s hands are. It hurts a bit, but mostly it’s the angle of his exposed neck, and how tilting his head to the side makes his jaw start throbbing lightly again.

“Have you taken a shower after?” Daryl asks.

Michael’s looking down, frowning a bit at this, and Daryl has both his hands and eyes busy with the side of Michael’s neck and face, almost as if he’s doing that to someone else entirely. “After what?”

“The fight.”

Sighing heavily, Michael lets out a weak, “Not yet,” because he knows this has little to do with showering and more to do with the fact that Daryl seems to think that Michael picked this fight. He did, in a way, by just being there in Jack’s laboratory, but he also didn’t fight back, because he knew that every single time Jack punched him, it was because he couldn’t punch himself.

“It’s a good idea,” he says, trailing off for a bit, before adding, as if he’d almost forgotten: “Doesn’t help with the pain, but I find showers always help us think.”

Michael tries nodding, but Daryl lets out an exasperated sigh that tells Michael to stop moving, so he does that instead. 

He winces again.

* * *

Michael’s sitting outside on the little step that was built probably on the sole fact that the soil had given and the house didn’t. It’s too short, so his legs hurt a bit from being bent in an angle like that, but he doesn’t mind that much. He’s got his arms wrapped around his knees, and on his left side, he hears the distant sounds of chattering and grief and everything in between getting mixed into something unintelligible. On his right ear, of course, he hears nothing.

He stares down at his bare feet.

He has to start wearing shoes again, if he intends on leaving the house.

His feet are dirty. Michael does need a shower. 

“What are you doing?” Halsey asks, standing behind him, inside the house. 

Michael knows it’s her, even though she doesn’t remember to position herself to his left. It’s alright, he thinks, even if it still makes him feel annoyed, having to turn his head in her direction.

“Just waiting,” he says, without telling her for what, because she’d ruin his hope with how pragmatic she can be. Halsey cocks an eyebrow and doesn’t ask, though, as if she can tell, and he adds: “Thanks for taking care of me before. And for, like, being around, I guess.”

Halsey passes him, and sits on the ground in front of him. She crosses her legs, slowly, like she’s taking her time, and he watches her, because he doesn’t have anywhere to go. She presses her lips together for a moment, taking a deep breath, and eventually says: “I’m glad you’re here too. Okay? I am.”

He believes her. Wholeheartedly.

“Sometimes I think about Scarlet,” he blurts out, because any attempt of further connection between them makes Michael think of her as a sister, which he knows is setting himself up for disappointment. 

Halsey’s face closes. At first she looks confused, then like she’s not breathing anymore.

Michael chews on his bottom lip, even though he knows it’s chapped enough to draw blood again, but stops himself before it gets too ugly. “Sorry I mentioned her. I just hadn’t thought about her in a few days, but I’m thinking about her again.”

“I know she was your sister,” Halsey starts, her voice careful but firm, “but you’re so much better off without her. She would’ve ruined you. She ruined everything,” she says. And Michael also believes her in that. Wholeheartedly.

The way she says it, her voice cracking a bit in the last few words, makes Michael wary. She’s never forgotten, and apparently never even entertained the thought of forgiving -- not that Michael blames her for that, or wouldn’t feel the same way if the roles were reversed. Surely there’s something essentially impossible to forgive and forget in the act of trying to end a person by burning down a place where they’re locked. Especially coming from a pre-teen. 

Michael understands that, while also understanding that he still needs to meet her, even though Halsey thinks he should be glad he never did.

But she doesn’t know Scarlet’s still alive.

Michael had forgotten that.

He nods slowly, because now he doesn’t have the stitches on his neck, and though it’s obviously still sore, he feels freer without them. “Yeah,” he says, reticent, looking away from her for a second. “You’re probably right.”


	34. welcome to the end of eras

By the end of the day he pays Jack a visit, he does it again, but Jack’s got safety glasses on and is working on Dennis’ leg. Michael notices that this time he’s wearing gloves too. He just misses him dismissively, without saying a word, so he figures it’s too early to be there again. Halsey asks about his piercing, and he says he lost it in the fight, even though he doesn’t have a black eye. Daryl doesn’t ask.

By the end of the second day, he goes there again. It’s the evening and he manages to force a smile to the few people he passes on the way to Jack’s lab, grateful that it’s no one he knows. Jack’s attentions are divided between a small computer screen and a screwdriver that he doesn’t even look like he knows he’s holding. Michael stops by the door and knocks on it twice. It’s wide open, and Jack must know it’s him, though he only says, “Come back tomorrow,” without looking up.

By the end of the third day, he’s so anxious he takes Halsey’s pills that help her fall asleep. She gives him two small ones, and he sleeps for almost fifteen hours. When he wakes up his head is dizzy and he feels hangover even though he hasn’t drunk in months. It’s too late to see Jack, and anyway he feels too boneless for that. He goes to the living room where Daryl’s reading, and sits next to him, pulling his legs up and quietly spending time without saying anything.

On the fourth day, he pays Jack a visit by midday. 

It’s a disturbing sight, seeing Jack’s profile, the safety goggles just far enough to be confused by goggles. It makes Michael’s stomach turn, how their noses look just the same, the sharpness of their jaws. Jack’s just like Luke, only more broken.

And fidgety.

Michael stops by the door with a frown. Jack’s got that same screwdriver from two days ago in his hands, and he’s playing with it like it’s perfectly normal to have a tool with an enormous yellow handle going swiftly from one hand to the next. Still with the safety glasses down, he’s staring at the computer screen in front of him, and one of his legs is going up and down fast.

“Uh,” Michael says, and clears his throat.

Jack turns to him abruptly, and the screwdriver falls to the floor. Jack doesn’t move to pick it up. “Fucking finally,” he breathes out, or that’s what Michael thinks he means to say anyway. He doesn’t say it loud enough that Michael’s ears catch it. Today, it’s like he’s in that old gymnasium of his head again, sounds echoing more often than not, a struggle to keep perfect balance if he gets distracted for a second. “Didn’t you see the open door?!” he points at it.

Michael ignores his annoyance, and walks properly into the room. 

He’s afraid to ask. 

If it turns out that Jack found nothing, there’s no place to go. He’ll have to come to terms with the fact that Halsey was right and he wasn’t: that Luke’s dead, and like him, all those other forty-five people. If Jack’s tracking led to Death Valley and to the cemetery, there’s nothing else to do. He’ll have to mourn, and swallow himself in self-pity once more, and refuse to leave his room or eat or shower and it’ll be so bad for everyone involved. But if it turns out that Jack did find something, that the tracker that was in his piercing and Luke’s leads to somewhere out of Death Valley, he’ll have to leave behind the place that he’s come to feel attached to, and set fate in motion. He’ll have a new fight to fight, or perhaps just get back to an old war. If someone did take Luke, peace will be the last thing on his mind. He’ll have to say goodbye to Daryl, for sure, and the possibility of rupture of a relationship that feels like only now was starting to feel as genuine as they both deserved it to be, well. Well. Well, well, well.

Either way, this is the end of everything.

Michael holds his breath, and shifts his weight to the other foot, stopping in the middle of the lab. To his side is Dennis’ robotic leg. It looks finished, but if it was, Michael assumes it’d be with him already. It must be missing some small details, but it looks good enough. It’s all metallic, except it looks stronger and heavier. There are purple pieces, probably because Jack didn’t have any new metal to spare, and used pieces from already existing things. It does look cool anyway, like it was done on purpose, even if under a close look it’s clear by its sloppiness that it wasn’t. 

He sort of wants to ask if he did it because he could, and because Dennis is just a kid, and because it was the right thing to do, or just because he was Joel’s kid, and Jack hopes to find Joel alive, just like Luke, and maybe still hopes to have a shot one day. 

Instead of asking that, he says: “Good job on the leg,” he says, slowly, still frowning.

Jack rolls his eyes. His leg goes up and down.

“Cm’ere,” he gestures, and his eyes go back to the screen. 

He doesn’t, not immediately anyway. Michael presses his lips together, forgetting that they’re still chapped even though they’re much, much better. It hurts a bit and he winces, then he shakes his head and works the nerve to take the few steps that take him closer to Jack and his damn computer. The thing is that he can’t quite breathe, or that he can but tells himself that his throat is closing just because he can’t take the no and he can’t take the yes. 

The air is thick between them, but it seems like only Michael notices. Just like he seems to be the only one to notice how it smells badly to alcohol in the laboratory -- not the type of alcohol that people drink, but the type of alcohol that people use to clean things sometimes. It was probably for Dennis’ leg, but the smell is so intoxicating that it burns Michael’s nostrils.

He takes a deep, deep breath, even though it burns more, because he’s stepping next to Jack.

Jack’s eyes are glued to the computer, like he expects Michael to be able to read what’s on the screen by himself. He isn’t. All he sees is a very bad version of a map in what looks like a military screen, split in two: one half made of green grids and more than one dot on it, the other half made of binary code. He narrows his eyes, trying to focus on the map, since he was definitely not going to be able to read anything in the code.

The dots around are in green too, and for a terrifying second, he considers the tracker may be pointing to all of those different places -- that Luke’s not only dead, but somehow has been dismembered. The thought makes him sick, and he thinks he’s going to throw up.

Jack looks at him, cocking an eyebrow. “Why do you look so pale?” 

Michael blinks a couple of times, meeting his eyes. “Not a lot of sun down here.”

Jack rolls his eyes.

“Look,” he says, looking again at the computer. Michael follows with a frown, still feeling a little sick, but at the same time trying to convince himself that Jack would be yelling and punching again if he had definitive bad news. “The tracker is too old, and I should’ve upgraded it with something better over the years, but it’s still working.” He sounds cheerful. It makes Michael want to punch him instead, because it’s not helping with the flips his stomach is making. “Do you see that?” he points at one specific dot, then the other three that are nearest to it.

Michael nods slowly, unable to look away, even when Jack looks at him.

“This is something.”

He takes a deep breath, “I can see it’s something. They’re dots. What the fuck do the dots mean, Jack?” 

Again, Jack seems incredibly unimpressed by Michael. 

“The tracking system isn’t sophisticated like satellite, but it still works well for small distances, which is why I’m having some trouble,” Jack says, and his eyes light up. Michael feels sicker, and has to seal his mouth shut and hold his breath, but Jack looks like he’s ready to start grinning. “Something definitely happened. The tracker’s been taken far, far away.”

He’s raising his eyebrows. He looks awfully proud of himself.

Michael is absolutely sure he’s going to throw up sooner or later. He holds his hands to his stomach, feeling his mind start spiralling, but manages to stand more or less still, taking the deepest breath of the day. It smells to alcohol.

“You’re saying you don’t think Luke’s in Death Valley.”

“Unless someone felt like taking his lip ring off and taking it with them on a little journey, I’m absolutely sure he’s not. I’m sure _they’re_ not,” he adds, smirking. He’s smirking, and Michael’s head is spinning faster. He presses his palm to his stomach, as if that could help. It doesn’t. He tastes bile in his mouth, but tries to steady his breath. Jack’s eyes are back at the computer, apparently oblivious to Michael’s minor nervous breakdown. “I’m trying to narrow down the signal, but because it’s not close enough, it’s sending me to different directions,” he frowns, and his leg keeps going up and down, and the smirk hasn’t left. He types something on the keyboard, and more code appears, but nothing in the map changes. “I may be able to have an approximation of a location tomorrow or so. You have to prepare yourself.”

Prepare himself. Hah.

That does it. He can’t take it anymore, but he does make it to the window in time. His body jerks forward as he throws up, screwing his eyes and heaving against it, knots of his fingers turned white against the window frame. 

He can hear Jack’s annoyed sigh behind him.

Michael gasps for air, keeping his eyes closed, eyes welling up so much that he can feel it so overwhelmingly that he feels as if he stops hungrily trying to get air into his lungs, he’ll collapse. Nostrils flaring, he opens his eyes. He doesn’t register the sight -- which is not pretty -- because his eyes are too blurry. His shoulders are going up and down too fast, and his neck, although it had plenty of time to start scarring properly, aches with the abruptness of his movements.

Carefully, he straightens his posture, and drops his head back, staring at the ceiling.

Weirdly enough, a smile starts taking shape in his mouth. He drops his head back, staring at the ceiling, and chuckles lowly, closing his eyes again. The tears come back, this time properly, and he laughs to himself for another second, then covering his face with both hands, even though his jaw still hurts, because hurting doesn’t matter.

Luke’s alive.

“So,” Jack trails off, making the vowel longer than anyone should, until Michael looks at him again. He’s still sitting on the only chair of the laboratory. His leg has stopped going up and down, but he’s got an eyebrow cocked, looking at Michael. “Like I was saying, you have to prepare yourself.”

Michael takes a deep breath, and this time it feels like breathing.

He nods. “Prepare myself,” he repeats. “Right.”

Jack narrows his eyes, as if he’s questioning Michael’s involvement in this, but shakes his head as if shaking away the thought of another argument. “Just gonna go and assume you don’t know what I mean by that,” he lifts his shoulders, gesturing dismissively. Michael raises his eyebrows, ready to argue that he does, that he can follow this train of thought, but Jack seems to need this, so he lets him have it. “You can’t go by yourself. You have to talk to people. Get whoever’s interested and won’t stop you to come with you, and then get Luke out of wherever he is. Here is the only place he’d be by choice.”

Michael’s teeth sink into his bottom lip.

His lip will never heal like this.

Jack adds, firmly: “Then never let him come back.”

Michael gives him a long look. He’s about to say that Jack’s selflessness doesn’t sit well with him, but then he realizes it isn’t selflessness at all. Jack putting Luke being safe as a priority instead of them seeing each other has nothing to do with altruism. It’s his own selfishness, because as long as Luke’s safe, then he doesn’t have to let worry eat him away.

He’s very familiar with the concept, as he isn’t much different.

Michael licks his lips, sighing heavily. “You said I have about a day before you know for sure.”

“I won’t know for sure,” Jack corrects him. “The mapping will never be complete. What I can get is an approximation, that I’m hoping to get in the next ten or twenty hours. When I do get it, you need to be ready to leave. We don’t know what’s happening with them, but it can’t be good. The longer you wait around, the longer they’re… just not here.”

Michael lets the _you_ waiting around bit slide, and nods cautiously.

“Okay. So I’ll check with you in a few hours.”

Jack raises his eyebrows, raising his finger to point at Michael. “Get a decent rescue team.”

Michael rolls his eyes, starting to walk out. “Alright, alright.”

But the second he’s out of the room, he’s grinning.

Luke’s alive.

This is the better alternative between the two ends of everything.

It’s still the end, but at least hope won.

* * *

To an outsider, this could be a rather disgusting experience.

Michael’s lying on his stomach, with his face pressed hard against the pillow, screaming. He’s cried all the tears that were left in him -- and there weren’t many -- and went from low chuckling to mad giggling in a matter of seconds -- and that went on for a while. But the screams were left unattended, and while he understood he couldn’t deal with the situation on his way from Jack’s laboratory back to the house, he remedied that as soon as he was in his room.

He’s screaming because everything ended, and because if Luke isn’t dead perhaps more are alive as well. He’s screaming because he’s diving head first in the belief that Jack’s going to lead him to victory and not a pile of bodies, that the two figures that Tati saw had taken interest for some morbid reason. He’s screaming because he needs to, and because he can muffle the noise against the pillow.

At some point after the strangled screams leave him, he just lets himself relax and wrap his arms properly around the pillow. It’s a little drooled on, and also a bit wet from the tears that came before that, but he doesn’t care in the slightest.

With a quiet smile on his face, he turns around, facing the ceiling and taking deep, slow breaths, forcing his heart to steady again so he can think straight. Because Jack’s right: he has to move so when Jack’s as ready as he’ll ever be, Michael will be ready to leave.

He considered telling Daryl, and felt a little strange that his father was the first person he thought of. But just like Daryl’s unwilling to let Halsey leave, he’ll be the same with Michael, if not worse. Plus he’d be more likely to go after the place where Luke’s supposedly being held than trust Michael to go on his own -- not because he cares for Luke personally, but because that woman’s been coming and leaving his city without him noticing her.

He’s telling Halsey, though. Halsey and Geordie need to come with, since they were there when Michael was broken out of prison all those months ago. They have experience and they sure must care enough for Luke, Ashton, and whoever else could still be alive to go. Maybe Geordie’s parents are alive as well, though Michael wouldn’t bet on that.

Only he is allowed to fool himself into thinking the most important people to him are the ones still alive. In the back of his mind he’s sure that what Nicole saw must’ve been a mistake, and he’ll find Joel in there, wherever _there _is, too. And then it won’t be as if he had lied to Jack -- Jack will be happy to know, when he finds out, too.__

But other than Halsey and Geordie, he doesn’t know who to turn to. All the Champions are either dead or have been taken, and he wouldn’t dream of asking Nicole, Benji, or Cameron for their aid. Not right now, not into a mission that could possibly lead nowhere.

He stares at the ceiling, now breathing in a rhythm that doesn’t make it feel like there’s something heavy pressed against his chest. It’s good to keep busy, planning, because then he doesn’t feel sick all over again. 

The more he focuses on the planning, the better it is, period.

Jack had asked for a decent team. Now all he has to do is assemble them.

* * *

“Where’s Halsey?”

Daryl blinks a couple of times, disoriented. He’s holding a piece of paper; looks like what a letter may have been if it was chewed and spat by a dog. It’s a bit wet, definitely about to tear apart, and the writing in it looks rushed and hard to understand. 

In his defense, he hadn’t meant to sneak in on him, but Daryl was frowning, standing by the window, looking so intently at it -- maybe trying to decipher what looks like a terrible handwriting from the distance -- that Michael couldn’t help it. It makes him mimic his father, blinking focus away from his eyes and looking at him with newfound curiosity.

The alarm leaves Daryl’s eyes in a blink of an eye. He clears his throat and tries to smile.

It looks out of place.

This doesn’t look like good news.

“Out,” he says. “I didn’t ask where she was going.” 

“What have you got there?” Michael asks, raising his chin as if he could magically get a zoom vision just from that alone. It’s pathetic and childish, but Michael would justify that with the fact that between the two of them, Michael’s got a lot of childish behavior to catch up with for the lost years.

“Things are changing fast,” Daryl says, folding the paper in half.

Michael stares at him. “That not only answers my question, but is also not cryptic at all.”

Daryl smiles that type of smile that grown-ups smile to children when they ask questions they’re not old enough to hear the answer to. Before he can control himself, he’s blurting out: “Is that about Mom? Are you trying to find her, because of what she did here?”

Though a simple yes-no would suffice for the time-being, instead Daryl sighs softly, saying: “I don’t know what to make of the Chaos-Order alliance. It may not be worth it anymore, but… I just don’t know.”

Michael looks at him, and then he really _looks_ at him.

There’s an uneasy feeling clawing at his shoulders, telling him this could be the last time he sees Daryl. It makes him want to start crying again, but he’s cried all of his tears, and it makes him want to scream just a tiny bit too, but then again, he’s out of those as well. He looks at Daryl and tries to take in all the details -- how much that he’s both hated and loved himself for in the mirror is right there in that face. He tries to take in the hard lines that came with age and war that his face doesn’t display yet, and the burn scars that were, to an extent, Michael’s doing.

He looks at Daryl and his heart breaks, but no tears come.

It’s the end and he knows it, but he couldn’t possibly sit around in Death Valley knowing someone took Luke and who knows how many more, and he, with Jack’s help, could maybe find and save them.

Michael’s frown grows deeper, and he takes a tentative step in his father’s direction.

“Hey, just so you know…” he starts, then stops himself, taking a deep breath. Daryl’s giving him a weird look, slowly putting the folded piece of paper on the back pocket of his pants as if he’s afraid Michael might try to snatch it away. “Just so you know,” he starts over, maintaining eye-contact -- the most difficult part. “We all do the best we can with what we have.”

The corner of his mouth goes up, just a little, and Michael mirrors that micromovement.

“Michael,” Daryl says, but it’s reticent and just choked up enough that Michael thinks this could be a breaking point for Daryl too. And he doesn’t want it to be sad and he doesn’t want it to be the last time they speak.

But. Just in case.

He presses his lips together, giving Daryl a small smile and meaning it.

“Dad,” he raises his eyebrows.

It’s a single word, but it conveys enough.

Professing love to a parent that was only there for a few months, no matter the reason for his absence, wouldn’t do. Though it could be as legitimate as the next cheesy thing Michael’s desperate mind could come up with, it wouldn’t ring as true for both of them as this word would. Because calling Daryl _Dad_ without the panic of extreme situations isn’t about love. It’s about accepting Daryl into his life, for whatever period of time they can make it work, and feeling sorry for the time spent with his heart filled with hatred and fear for the man standing now before him. 

It’s not a promise, because it’s not about the future. It’s a statement. It’s about the now.

Daryl seems to understand. He smiles, nodding slowly, and pats Michael weakly on the back.

“My boy.”

* * *

Out to find Halsey, he finds that he doesn’t know where to go.

With the other Champions gone and her relationship with Geordie apparently hitting a rough patch, it isn’t like she has many friends to turn to. The thought would sadden him, but he’s got no time to be sad. He needs to find her, convince her that Luke and others could still be alive, and get her on board with this, so they’re ready soon.

For about half an hour, he walks around the city trying to find her. He’s wearing shoes this time, and manages to nod acknowledging to the few people he sees. It’s strange, he thinks, looking at them with such urgency, searching their faces for somebody else. They don’t look at him like they hate him for not having been able to save the dead, or like they expect him to bring them back from their graves, like he’s planning to do. 

They just nod back, acknowledging him too.

When he begins to feel tired, body still sore from a couple of days ago, he walks back to the small and sad excuse for a park that Death Valley holds. There are two children in the swing, with adult supervision of an old-looking woman with her white hair braided back. She’s sitting in a bench across from them, watching the two children play.

Michael looks at her, and eventually asks if he can sit on the bench too. She nods, without looking away from the children. Michael’s perplexed by her existence -- she can’t be younger than sixty, and yet she’s Chaos, yet she’s still alive.

He watches her watch the children.

It fuels his hope, foolishly so, but it gives him such euphoria that it’s hard to mask. She eventually notices, raising her eyebrows at him, looking his way without moving her head much. “Are you okay?” she asks, but in a way that makes it clear she wants to know the answer.

Michael chuckles lowly, nodding.

She nods too, as if to say: okay then.

But then he says: “Things won’t always be that broken.” The woman sighs softly, her eyes still ahead. Michael’s not sure she even heard him, but in case she just chose not to reply, he adds: “You probably already know that. I’m sorry.”

She turns to him for the first time, and he can see from that close that she has a scar that cuts through her face, starting somewhere along her nose and continuing in a broken pattern down her cheek until it meets her chin. When she smiles, the scar dances.

“Because I’m old?” she offers.

Michael stutters a bit before he can find words. “That’s not what I meant. I’m sorry,” he repeats.

She laughs, lifting her shoulders. “You gotta stop apologizing.” She pauses, and Michael considers why he’s so careful to be polite with her, and finds that it’s only because she’s so much older. It feels like both a bad and a good reason, but logical all the same. He doesn’t apologize for apologizing. “I suppose you’re right. I’ve seen this before. Chaos is strong. It’s why they never eradicated us, or not in this country anyway,” she raises her chin a bit. “Things may seem bad now with the bombing, and they’ll get worse before they get better. But it’s how things always are, not only in war but in life too. If you reach rock bottom, there’s no way to go but up.”

Michael chews on his bottom lip, looking away at the children.

“Are they yours?” 

It gives her pause. “Now they are, I guess.”

He doesn’t have to ask for details, though he wants to. Instead he pulls his legs up and crosses them, still plenty of space between her and the woman, but the movement catches her attention anyway. She gives him a long look, like she’s trying to decide whether to say something or not. She must decide against it, because she finally looks back at the children.

They’re silent for a while longer, and then he tries his luck: “Excuse me, but do you know Geordie, the human?”

He realizes he never learned her last name.

If she’s Geordie The Human, is he Michael Full-of-shit? 

“Ah, the humans,” the woman says, taking a deep breath. She pulls the perfectly white braid around so it’s resting over her shoulder, and it takes her a moment. “Tragedy, innit? They won’t make it to the end of the year. First Ilana was killed when they killed everyone in the village… she was their leader, you know? She had a daughter, too, just around your age. Diana. Close friends with that Geordie you’re looking for. Ilana’s death was the first of a series of problems that never stopped coming at the humans.”

He looks at her again. “Ilana was the leader of the south, right? There’s someone else in the north, I heard. And probably someone in the center, too?”

The woman snorts, like she’s disgusted. For a second, he thinks she’s going to spit on the ground. But then she presses her lips in a thin line and considers her words. 

“Look, Ilana was the only one worth trusting, and when she was killed, nearly all humans died too. Now they’re all dead. I don’t care about the north, boy. All humans that are in the north are refugees that are scared out of their minds of magick. They’re not cut for living with our kind, or with Order for that matter.”

All things considered, Michael doesn’t think they’re too wrong to be afraid, but that’s not what he says. “And how about the center? All around the capital?”

The woman gives him a look of disbelief. “The humans who live there, they’re not much more than slaves of the Order. The capital is hell on Earth. Order managed to make sure it’s illegal to be Chaos in this country, like we have a choice, so we don’t live there. But they still need to boss someone around to make sure everyone knows how powerful they are. Guess who were the only ones available?”

Before, his understanding of the world was quite simple: Order was right, Chaos was evil, and humans were not as intelligent or capable as the rest of them -- as the rest of Order -- but they were useful in their own way. 

He wishes he could have met Ilana, and even gotten close to his daughter Diana. He wishes he could have understood more of the real fight of humans, that Geordie never mentioned at all. 

“And Geordie?” he tries, voice small.

She takes a deep breath, looking again at the children. 

“I don’t know if she’s staying at the place where her folks used to live, but if so, you take that street,” she closes one way and points towards west, and Michael nods, looking in that direction as well, “pass the small yellow house, make a turn to the left, and keep going straight ahead until you see a house with weird flowers.”

“Flowers,” he repeats, not as a question but as a statement of surprise.

The woman gives her an expression that reads _I know_. “Geordie’s parents were fond of flowers. I never understood the appeal.”

* * *

Though he doesn’t find Halsey, he’s standing in front of the house with flowers.

It must’ve been around three or four hours since he last saw Jack, and the lights tell him it’s still sometime around the afternoon, too early for dinner anyway, but it feels like it’s getting dark. Maybe the way the sky gets dark when a storm approaches. It certainly feels like it.

The flowers are all yellow, but it’s a type Michael never saw before in the city, maybe because the flowers are mostly engineered to look a certain way, and yellow isn’t usually the choice. The round middle is brown, but the petals look delicate and still somehow strong, expanding for almost the size of his fingers. He bites his bottom lip, it hurts and he stops, and he stands there for another moment.

Then, in a rush of bravery, he walks closer to the door and knocks on it twice.

It doesn’t take long for Geordie to answer the door. She’s wearing flipflops, shorts, and a tank top. The sight makes Michael feel weird, like he’s not supposed to see her if she’s not geared up for combat. Her hair is pulled up in a ponytail, and she studies him for a long second before cracking a small smile.

It comes anyway, though.

“Come in,” she offers, walking back inside, leaving the door for Michael to deal with.

He closes it behind him.

The space is small, but it’s still beautiful in a way that the Big House never accomplished to be. The living room and the kitchen consist of the same room, a stove and sink under a window on one side, on the other a couch for two. Geordie pulls a chair from the table that’s just next to the sink, and sits in front of the couch, Michael still standing in the middle of the room, a little lost.

He sits on the couch, but still isn’t done drinking on the beauty of the place.

The walls are all painted a light tone of orange, and there are paintings hanging from them. The one just next to the door is on the biggest metal frame -- it’s a red and blue mess that probably a child drew. Geordie. Her parents had an early drawing of her framed. Across the room there are different types of art, though. There’s a painting of a woman with no eyebrows looking eerily calm, and a disturbing one of a (maybe?) man screaming, with both hands pressed to his ears. There’s an enormous field that seems to go on forever, and Michael’s favorite, a simple drawing of a man with two sets of arms and two sets of legs, with a circle around him.

Geordie follows his gaze.

“That’s the Vitruvian Man,” she smiles, somewhere between proud and smug. Michael blinks a couple of times, looking at her. She adds: “A guy named Leonardo da Vinci drew it. You’d know all about it if stuff by humans wasn’t considered shit,” she smiles again, and this time it’s a whole different type of smile. It’s pressed and bitter and makes Michael sink on her couch.

“Maybe I would’ve liked to learn about him in school,” he offers.

She snorts. “Maybe I would’ve liked to _go_ to school.”

Michael doesn’t think she would. Not high school anyway. But maybe college. She could major in art and teach the rest of the country about art they didn’t care about for all the wrong reasons.

“Are these originals?” he asks, gesturing broadly to the walls.

“Mom loved to say they were, but nah,” she rolls her eyes, first smile back. “They’re just cheap copies. I think The Scream,” she turns around, to look at the most disturbing of the paintings, “was even my Dad’s reading on the Edvard Munch piece.” 

Michael raises his eyebrows, impressed.

He couldn’t paint something like that at all.

But then he looks back at her, and it makes him feel a thousand things. He feels sad that she lost her parents and is losing her race. He feels outraged that she had such deep interest in art and never told him. He feels ashamed to not have looked for her before. He feels miserably guilty that he’d never actively done something for humans. He feels sorrow that he’s been considering her a friend for the past months, without working hard for this friendship at all.

Instead of manifesting any of that, all he asks is: “How are you holding up?”

She shrugs. “I just am. Not sure on the how.”

Michael nods, staring at his feet.

“Jason comes by sometimes,” she adds, as an afterthought. “He was raised by his Grandpa, and he was already old, y’know? But everyone cared about him, the old man. Jason lost him in the explosion too. I talked to him about maybe heading north, but he doesn’t want to stop being an assassin-for-hire, which I can’t understand for the life of me,” she chuckles, shaking her head fondly. “I think he just needs to fool himself into thinking his life is worth living.”

Their eyes meet, then.

“I have to tell you something.”

“I’m listening.”

Michael takes a deep breath, and runs his hands over his head. His fingers accidentally graze over his cut ear, and he swears under his breath at the burning that shoots through him. Geordie notices, but doesn’t say anything.

He clears his throat, and looks at her again.

“Listen, I don’t want to give you false hope, but Jack found something, and it’s urgent. In case you’re interested… Look, I don’t want you to feel like you have to. Honestly. But I have to ask,” he pauses, breathing out heavily once more. “Luke was taken somewhere, and maybe others were, too. This could lead nowhere, but.”

Geordie looks away from him; abruptly, even.

She stands up from the chair she’s pulled closer to the couch for herself, and goes to the stove. With her back turned to Michael, she asks, louder than she needed to: “Do you want some tea?” 

Michael doesn’t reply. She starts making it anyway. 

He waits, hearing his heart echo as the water boils.

In a few minutes, she’s back on the chair, with a glass of water but with tea on it, two or three leaves of what he thinks is mint still floating around in the hot water. She takes a few sips, looking down at it instead of at Michael.

And then she finally does look at him.

“I’m in,” she says. “Count me in.”


	35. done my time and served my sentence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SO FUCKING EXCITED I CAN'T BELIEVVVV. :') IM SCREAMING I HOPE U LIKE THIS  
> (very useful author's note that gives you special insight in the story. i know.)

The walk back from Geordie’s house is unsettling. He can’t help feeling like he’s running out of time, even though he still has at least until the night to move. In the end, he did accept Geordie’s tea, and stayed for long enough that they talked basics of what to do next: Michael’s hearing is compromised, so he’ll need her more than ever. His balance is off when he needs it most, and he doesn’t think he can shoot. He’s been practicing his magick very little, and doesn’t know where it stands. He’s still sore all over from the fight with Jack, and his neck, whenever he tries to angle it to one side or the other, aches so much he can feel it burning down his spine, even if the forming scars are on the side. 

In other words, he’s next to useless, or that’s how he feels, anyway, but he doesn’t tell Geordie that. He just lays the facts, and she nods and makes mental notes that go uninterrupted as she chooses to stop listening whenever there’s something more important going in her head.

Michael hadn’t asked her about her plans to go north and try to find the village of humans. Before talking to that old woman, Michael hadn’t even known there were humans in this country that still feared magick. Michael isn’t sure Geordie knows that, either.

He also didn’t mention Halsey. He’s hoping that bringing Halsey into this could be a way for them to get back to where they left off -- to start talking again, and maybe stop fighting. Michael could tell how badly Halsey missed her, but didn’t think it was his place to tell Geordie that.

“Where’s Daryl?” Michael asks, when he walks in the house and only finds Halsey by the kitchen, a big wooden spoon in her hand, eyes on a cauldron on the stove. “Anything happened?”

She shakes her head, putting the spoon back on the cauldron, frowning a bit at the contents of it. “Probably, but nothing I know anyway. Jeremiah came in earlier, gave Daryl a letter that messed him up. I tried following Jeremiah, but he just went back to his family and I found out nothing,” she lifts her shoulders. “When I came back Daryl was gone.”

Michael shifts his weight to the other foot. 

“What are you cooking?”

“Soup, of course.”

Pressing his lips together seems to buy him time. He doesn’t understand the logic of it, but he’d swear it works every time, or at least every time it matters. He watches Halsey’s growing interest in -- or distrust of -- the soup as the spoon goes round and round, and eventually he manages to walk a few steps closer, touching her arm carefully.

“We need to talk about something, Halz. Can the soup wait?”

She sighs, leaving the soup simmering and rubbing her hands on the front of her pants.

“What’s up?”

Michael looks at her, tries to see past the hard eyes and the young woman who followed a man back to his house in a search for answers. He’s not sure what he sees exactly, but he wishes there was more of what he used to see when he wasn’t looking so intently.

The same approach that worked with Geordie wouldn’t be likely to work with Halsey -- he’s not even sure it was the approach that worked with Geordie at all, maybe just the fact that she had nothing better to do. He realizes that he maybe should’ve rehearsed this conversation in his head, especially as her expression becomes more impatient and his breath becomes more extended, longer, clearly trying to set a calm pace for himself.

Halsey cocks an eyebrow, and Michael blinks a couple of times.

“So it turns out that maybe there are survivors that weren’t accounted for, in the explosion?” he tries. Halsey narrows her eyes, and it looks like outrage starts at her throat but doesn’t end there. She parts her lips, but Michael gives her no chance to interrupt him. “There’s a real chance people could still be alive. Someone took some of the bodies. Tati saw it, and Jack confirmed it because he could track Luke.”

She starts shaking her head, her expression twisted in something that hurts to look, but definitely not as much as it hurts for her. She closes her eyes, says, very quietly: “Don’t,” or at least that’s what Michael thinks she says. He doesn’t hear it.

“I’ll go, and see what I can find--”

“They’re dead, Michael. They’re all dead.”

Her tone gives Michael pause. She seems to believe it so, so much, that Michael questions his own beliefs for a second or two. Or maybe that’s not even it. Maybe it’s just that it’s so shocking, how badly she’d rather shield herself against the possibility of disappointment, than to let hope in for once. It makes him feel inadequate and naive, so much younger than hers that he has no place in talking to her like she’s his equal.

He finds that he hates the cynicism.

“I’m going,” he starts again, “and so is Geordie. It would mean a lot if you could make it too.”

The name makes her look at Michael differently. Michael can’t tell if she’s proud of him for having talked to Geordie before her, or that she’s disgusted. Either way, it wouldn’t matter. He’s holding eye-contact and his breath steady, and she’s looking at him like he’s just hurt her in the worst possible way. Being looked at that way weighs down someone’s shoulders, like a brand new burden to carry, but Michael will take that, too, if she says yes.

Halsey holds his gaze for a second, before taking a deep breath.

He holds his breath. This is the moment of small victories.

Then she snorts, shaking her head, and going back to her soup.

“You’re chasing ghosts. I hope you don’t die out there.”

Michael frowns, unable to come to terms with what she’s saying. This time, it’s not his right ear that is to blame -- he hears it perfectly, just isn’t sure he can comprehend it. He stands there, a little behind her, feeling like a thousand years behind in many other ways. Halsey keeps her back to him and her attention back on the stove.

He searches his head for something to say that could change her mind, and all he can come up with is: “Luke isn’t dead. He wouldn’t leave me like that.”

Paraphrasing what a twelve year old told him about his father is the best he can at the moment.

It doesn’t work very well for Halsey.

She only lifts her shoulders, without turning to see him, and says: “Do what you must. I’ll be here when you come back, and hopefully there’ll still be soup.”

* * *

“Didn’t expect to see you back here so soon,” Geordie says, opening the door for him.

This time, she doesn’t go back inside so he can walk in. She stays put, blocking the view of inside, with a frown on her face. There’s certain change about her, Michael thinks -- her shoulders are still tense like she’s in attack mode, her eyes still searching far more than just faces. But there’s a sense of purpose that Michael feels like it’s partly his fault. Not that he inflicted that alone, but that their rescue mission did. 

It makes him smile, even though he’s fidgety and nervous.

“I have bad news, I guess, and I need your help.”

Geordie hits her tongue against the palate, making a _tsk_ sound. “I’m in the middle of something now, actually.” Her eyes are apologetic, and tell Michael to leave.

But he, of course, doesn’t.

He narrows his eyes, looking at her.

“Who’s that?” comes a voice from inside.

Michael tilts his chin up so he can see past Geordie.

Reluctantly, she opens the door more, and Jason comes to stop by her side. He looks different, and though it’s to be expected, that certainly tragedies change everyone unlucky enough to be involved, it’s still so shocking with Jason that it looks like he’s actually aged. His freckles and wild wavy hair are still there, but the flirtatious spark in his eyes is gone, along with the seemingly constant smirk. He’s serious, if anything a bit distrustful, with his eyebrows raised.

“It’s just Michael,” she says. “He’s leaving.” 

“I’m not leaving,” he argues.

Geordie glares at him. Jason looks mildly interested, from him to her, and then he asks: “What’s really happening here, Geordie?” It’s a brief pause, Geordie parting her lips, and then Jason gestures dismissively at her, walking back inside. She comes after him, so Michael does too, closing the door behind him. “No, don’t lie. Don’t try to bullshit me.”

“I wasn’t going to lie,” she says, probably lying.

Jason gives her a tired look, and sits back on the couch. Michael looks at Geordie, trying to think of something fast to interfere that may not end up making the situation worse, but Jason’s not done talking yet. “You tell me you’re not going north anymore, that you want me to go. And that’s fine, I guess, but then _he_ shows up here? Something’s off. Why are you giving up going after other humans?” 

She blinks a couple of times, looking at him.

“You’re not, are you? Michael found something,” he adds. 

She doesn’t say he’s wrong, but doesn’t say he’s right, either. She sits on the couch next to him, and Michael stays in the background as an observer, a bypasser, anything but participant on this. Geordie takes Jason’s hand, and Michael doesn’t think he’s ever seen her look so fragile and vulnerable before. She’s looking him in the eye, and her voice is soft but firm when she says:

“Humans from the city have been brainwashed to think it’s okay to be treated like less, that they really aren’t good enough for anything but being bossed around. So then, if you die, there’s no one of our kind left, no one that really knows what it’s like.”

Jason covers her hand with his.

“I know it’s tough on you because of your parents and Diana--”

“Shut up,” she says, but weirdly enough, in a kind way, shaking her head slightly. “You lost the only family you ever had. Diana was just as important to you, too. It’s tough on me and it’s tough on you and it’s tough on all of us. We’re assassins, remember? We’re supposed to get our cash and do what we’re paid to do and then just move on to the next thing. What happened to us? Our leader is dead, and now her daughter, one of our closest friends… she’s dead too.”

She’s not crying, but her tone is sad like she is.

Michael feels like leaving all of sudden, like this is too intimate for him to see. 

But they’re not paying him any attention. 

“What happened to us,” Jason repeats, and chuckles lowly, raising his shoulders. “We’re humans. We care, be it our people or not. I think it’s a flaw written in our DNA.”

They’re silent for a second, and then the corner of Jason’s mouth goes up just a tiny bit. Not quite a smile, not at all the smirk he used to display so smugly, but it’s something. He squeezes her hand on top of his, and then lets go. She does, too, turning to Michael. She blinks away the emotion, the fragility apparently gone in an instant.

“Michael, what is it?” she asks.

He presses his lips together, and this time it doesn’t buy him time. This time, it only puts him in more evidence and how out of place he is. He clears his throat a little awkwardly, cracking his knuckles. “Halsey’s not in. So it’s just the two of us.”

She nods, and then turns back to Jason.

“There’s no money in it,” she says, “and if we both die, our history dies with us.”

Jason studies her for a moment. He doesn’t ask what is it that they intend to do exactly, if they have any plan, or what this is about specifically. What he says, after careful consideration, is: “So if it comes down to you and me, you should live. You’re stronger.”

Geordie sighs softly, then nods.

Michael doesn’t get it at all, but this time, he feels grateful that he couldn’t possibly interfere.

When the tense and yet delicate moment is gone, Geordie looks back at Michael.

“I would ask you if it’d be okay to ask Jason,” Michael comments, his voice small.

She smiles, but it doesn’t feel like a small, because it isn’t warm. 

“That’s because you don’t know anyone else who’s still alive, isn’t it,” Jason says, and he may sound like he’s mocking, but there’s a hint of truth in it as well, and they both know it. It’s not so much about knowing people, as much as it is about trusting them. 

And on the sole premise that he was trusted by Champions, Michael finds it easy to trust him.

“Okay, here’s the thing,” Michael starts again, walking closer to them. “Geordie can tell you all the details, but I can’t stay. There won’t be just the three of us, but for that to work out I need to figure something out--”

“Halsey,” Geordie says, raising her eyebrows and voice, “will not change her mind.”

Michael licks his lips, nodding slowly. “I… I know that. So,” he tries to smile, looking to Jason because looking at Geordie feels pointless, with how she seems capable of getting inside his head and seeing whatever’s left there to see. “If you two could get your shit, guns, bullets, I don’t know -- if you could get your stuff and be ready, we’re leaving as soon as it gets dark. Well, darker than now anyway. It never gets completely dark in Death Valley,” he pauses. “We have to see Jack for coordinates, too. Can you meet me outside his lab?”

“Yeah, I still have my jeep. We’ll be there.”

Michael stands up, taking a deep breath. 

“Okay. So I’ll see you soon.”

* * *

Michael spends most of his last few hours in Death Valley out of the house, but when he does return, his stomach does flips. He feels as if every step is the last, and in a way, it is. Having already come to terms with the end of everything, it’s also certainly the end of his stay in Death Valley. He knows he won’t die just yet, not before he comes back to free these people, but who will be left, and under which conditions, are things he would just rather not think about.

The night’s fallen, and though it isn’t late, it’s late enough that sleepiness seems to have gotten the best of Daryl. He’s lying on the couch of their small living room, looking too big and out of place for a couch so small. There’s a book open on his stomach, one hand covering enough of the cover that Michael can’t make the title, but by the size of the book, Michael thinks it’s another Order history textbook.

Michael thinks it’s a practice of self-loathing, reading what the winners of the Magick War had to write about the losers. But he doesn’t take the book away from him. He just takes a deep breath, and moves for his bedroom.

In there, there’s already an improvised backpack waiting for him. He doesn’t really have one, so he had put together most of the clothes he still had, wrapped in a bedsheet, and given it enough knots that it could hold for travel. He doesn’t have guns of himself, but he’s counting on Geordie and Jason to be able to have those, and on Jack to give him a thing or two for the road.

He looks around the bedroom that has been his for the past two weeks or so.

There’s no attachment there, no real feeling. This isn’t like his room in the Big House, where he spent his first night in the city, where he woke up in Luke’s arms, where he took long showers and slept in. This is just the room he woke up after he thought he was dead, where he learned so many people he cared about were, in fact, dead. This is a place he’ll be glad to leave.

But not Daryl, not Halsey.

He walks past her bedroom with his heart in his throat, but doesn’t knock. The door is closed, and she knows he’s headed out. And from a logical point of view, then maybe he gets her; understands why she’d choose to stay, why she wouldn’t want to embark on a mission that, as she put it, is chasing ghosts. But that’s speaking logically, and logic is the last thing in his mind. At best, it always came on second place. Emotion always took the lead, be it in his best or worst moments. Right now he’s hoping it’s the former.

Michael takes a deep, deep breath, back in the living room, holding the improvised bag in his arms. He can’t look away from Daryl at first, how his chest rises and falls very softly, his eyes closed, his face covered in still forming scars.

His hearing has been especially sharp these last few hours, but still he can’t listen to a sound in the house. Everything is quiet, as if to signal his departure from the city he could have grown up with, had he stayed with his father instead of mother. He tries not to think of how much things could’ve been different, because then he’ll have to think that they aren’t, and what that means. 

Thinking of Karen gives him headaches, crushing weight of guilt and anxiety.

Though he knows time is a delicate thing right now, he still comes closer to Daryl, kneels down next to him, and touches the side of his face. Daryl continues to sleep, and Michael holds his breath. With that never-leaving lump in his throat, Michael closes his eyes, pressing his lips to his father’s forehead.

He hopes this isn’t goodbye forever.

Then he stands up, and leaves the house.

* * *

The few people who do see him, seem to pretend like they haven’t. 

There’s something suspicious about a teenager carrying his clothes wrapped in a bedsheet in his arms around city, even more so if said teenager is the supposed prince and savior of town. The people who do look at him, quickly looking away right after, seem to get that there’s something serious about to happen, and maybe they’re just tired of serious things happening to them. It hasn’t been two full weeks since the last terrible tragedy, and that hadn’t been three full months after the attack on the human village.

The constant terror and threat for their safety must be enough that it makes them look away.

If Michael’s fulfilling his destiny to save them, and in the process he’s escaping in the middle of the night, then fine. If it doesn’t have to do with what The Trinity has seen him do, then whatever, they don’t care. 

Still he walks the roads in a fast pace, getting to Jack’s laboratory before Geordie’s jeep, with his breath uneasy when he knocks on the door irritably, because it was supposed to be open.

He doesn’t remember Jack and him actually agreeing on the door being open, but it feels like something crucial, and he’s suddenly annoyed at Jack not taking this seriously enough.

Jack opens the door with a frown.

“Why are you never on time?” 

Michael rolls his eyes. “You said ten or _twenty_ hours.” 

It’s been around eight.

Glaring at him, Jack gestures dismissively, until he’s retreating all the way back to his computer. “I think I won’t get a better reading than this,” he points, and Michael follows him, dropping the wrapped bedsheet by the door. “This,” he points at the only significant dot on the green screen now, “is where the tracker is. But that,” he points at the quadrant, “is very fucking wide area. I can’t just give you coordinates. I can give you a general direction, and you go from there.”

Michael nods. “That works too.”

For the smallest of seconds, Michael thinks he sees Jack look at him in pride, trust, something strong and powerful that could make them friends in another life. But as soon as it appears, it’s also gone. Jack presses his lips together with a frown, and after a moment of consideration, he asks: “Where’s the rescue team? You don’t expect to go wherever it is that my brother is alone, do you?”

“They’re coming,” he says, trying not to be offended by the tone of voice. 

“Who is?” 

“Geordie and Jason.”

There’s a pause. Jack cocks an eyebrow, staring at Michael, and very slowly, like he thinks Michael may not be hearing him right, or may not be answering the right question to what he’s asking anyway, he says: “Your rescue team consists of two humans, with no magick at all?”

Michael gives him a look as full of disbelief as the one he’s receiving. “They can handle themselves better in a fight than you. They have training and guns.”

Jack opens his mouth, outraged, but closes it again before he speaks. Clearing his throat, he shakes his head, saying: “I don’t believe this. My brother’s life is at the stake, and all I can send his way is a witch that can’t control his magick, and two _humans_.”

Michael raises both of his eyebrows, looking at him.

“Are you done?”

Jack rolls his eyes, staring back at the screen.

“When Luke broke me out of the Order prison, he had a modified adrenaline shot. I imagine that was from you?” he tries. Jack nods, slowly turning back to Michael. “I need as much of that as you have. I don’t know what we’ll be walking into.”

“I have… yeah, I have some stuff.”

Jack stands up from in front of the computer, and goes to the back of the room, opens the door to the bathroom, and disappears inside. Michael turns around, looking at the laboratory, still dirty and mostly broken, but somehow not looking as bad as when he first got there after the explosion. He feels like a different person, too, even though his jaw still aches a bit, and the side of his stomach still carries a purple bruise -- but turning to green, which is, he supposes, progress. 

Jack comes back with a small box that Michael assumes he keeps hidden. He sits it next to the keyboard on the desk, and opens its lid. Michael sees four syringes wrapped tightly in plastic, and three very small glass bottles. The liquid in the syringes is purple, the one in the capped glasses is transparent, just like water.

Michael looks at Jack. “You only have four?”

Nodding somewhat apologetically, Jack closes the lid again, and hands it to Michael. “I didn’t know I’d be needing to make more. That’s all I could do.” He pauses, waits for Michael to hold the box in his hands, and then adds, his voice a weird mix of shyness and something else: “Aren’t you going to ask about the other stuff?”

Michael breathes out softly. “They’re eyedrops. I know what it is.”

Jack catches his bottom lip between his teeth, just like Luke used to do when he was still around for Michael to pay attention to that. “You have to be very careful with that shit. You never took it. It’ll fuck up your self-control. But, you know, it’s my little brother we’re talking about here, and you’re only going with humans, so… You better take it if you feel like it’s the only way.”

The metal box feels cold in his hands. He stares down at it for a second.

“I don’t plan on taking it, but thanks anyway.”

“You will,” he says, sounding neither smug nor rightful. “You’ll take it. Eventually. Everyone takes Opia if they can put their hands on it.”

Michael raises his eyebrows, trying to go for a smile. “So thanks for your stash, I guess.”

Jack lifts his shoulders. 

“Ah, about your piercing? I had to dissolve it. You don’t have it anymore.” He sounds as if he thinks it’s funny, but Michael doesn’t comment on it.

Michael turns away from him, going back to his wrapped bedsheet and finding a place between his clothes to keep the box safe. His heart starts speeding up, and maybe it’s because he can tell. He looks out the laboratory, and sees the jeep approaching, with the headlights turned off. Michael steps out just in case, and he sees Geordie and Jason inside. 

Jason’s busy with something on his lap, but Geordie gives him a tiny reassuring smile.

And he goes back inside.

“They’re here. Let’s go.”

Jack gives him a long look, raising an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

Michael walks closer to him, impatient. “The jeep’s here. We don’t have much time before someone thinks that’s a bit too weird, that there are mercenaries in front of your laboratory. I don’t need Dad to wake up and--”

“Dad?” he snorts. 

Michael ignores him.

“We have to go,” he says, instead, as firmly as he can manage.

Jack shakes his head as if to shake off thoughts, taking a step back from Michael. “Look, I did all that I could. I tracked them down. I gave you my drugs. And I did that, because I need you to save my brother and--” he pauses, choked up, and adds, sounding smaller: “And Joel. And whoever else you can find. And I would sure love to get the fuck away from this awful city, but in case you didn’t notice, your daddy made me a prisoner for life,” he lifts his hand, the one with the bracelet. 

He looks at Michael as if Michael’s a child.

And when Nicole looks at him that way, he feels embraced.

When Jack does, he’s just annoyed.

“Will you shut the fuck up or,” he raises his eyebrows.

Jack doesn’t give him any response, not until Michael’s coming closer and closer, grabbing his wrist even though he tries to yank it away. Michael takes a deep, deep breath, and calls his magick. With the fingers of one hand wrapped around Jack’s wrist, the other opens, palm up, as he breathes in as slowly as he can, and starts feeling it approach him.

The magick starts from within, but he can still feel it licking at his ankles, his calves, and at the back of his neck. He feels the energetic pulse through his neck scar and the cut on his ear. He feels it vibrating through the bruise on his stomach and the aching of his jaw. He feels it until it’s engulfing him whole.

“You can’t,” Jack says, sounding urgent and desperate, even though his voice is just above a whisper. “If you try to remove it, it’s going to kill me.”

Michael opens his eyes, and the world he sees with these eyes is full of void, and the only blue energy, the cells of Jack’s body, try to jerk away from him.

“But you’re already dead anyway. Might as well try to bring you to life,” he smirks.

Even through Jack trying to yank his hand free, Michael focus. With his eyes open and staring at the bracelet wrapping tightly around Jack’s wrist, he sees the dead particles around it, vibrating at the lowest frequency, and manages to connect himself to them. His eyes close very briefly, but when he opens them again, they’re still rolled back.

Jack’s breath is heavy and he’s still talking, pleading for something, but on top of Michael’s partial loss of hearing, he’s also not paying attention. He can taste the metal in his tongue, feel the rigidness of the material in his bones. Every sharp needle retracted in the bracelet traces gently up his spine, raising goosebumps in its wake.

Michael closes his free hand slowly, carefully, making of each of his fingers another piece of the bracelet. And then, abruptly, he opens his palm again. He hears something crack, and at first he thinks it’s his bones. 

He screws his eyes shut, taking a numb step back, and then snaps them open. His head is pounding and the muscles of his hand feel sore, but when he looks at it, it’s not bleeding.

It says something that he checks to see if his hand is bleeding before he checks to see if Jack’s been injected with the poison. 

But no, he hasn’t. He’s staring at his free wrist, holding it with his other hand, that is shaking, his eyes wide and a mix of terrified and touched. On the floor, the bracelet is split in half, its needles pointing up like spikes, the poison reaching nothing but the floor.

Michael takes a deep, deep breath, and looks at Jack with the smirk back.

Jack eyes him like he’s out of this world.

In retrospect, Michael could’ve told him that he’s been practicing all day, and that he was 98% sure he could pull this off. It’s just that he feels, after the beating he received practically wordlessly from Jack, he deserved the scare.

“Shall we?” he raises his eyebrows.

Jack nods slowly, still disoriented.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jack massaging his wrist, but following him. There’s something empowering in that, having Jack speechless and, for once, absolutely stripped out of his typical attitude. It pushes aside all second thoughts, and for that, he’s very grateful.

The smile on his face lasts for only a few seconds after he leaves the laboratory.

Outside there’s the jeep with the headlights off, and Geordie and Jason still in it, but also somebody else. He’s still far away enough that probably the two humans didn’t spot him, but close enough that Michael does, and he’s seen, too. There’s already a look of distrust from afar in Dennis’ eyes when he sees Michael leaving the lab, but it grows to something of deeper confusion when Jack steps out too, just behind him.

Jack doesn’t seem to see Dennis. He walks around the jeep, stopping in front of one of the passenger doors, and waits, with a frown on his face and one hand pressed to the wrist abused over the years. Geordie sees him first, her jaw dropping as she turns around, staring at him, and then at Michael.

Jason follows her gaze, and shrugs in a way that signals he couldn’t possibly care less.

“Don’t ask. It’ll save us time,” he says.

Jack struggles to open the door of the car, and though Michael catches that as Jack curses under his breath pulling the handle in all the wrong ways, he hears Jason chuckle, and Geordie’s silence is heavy enough that he hears that, too.

Dennis stopped walking. He’s standing in the middle of the road, still using one crutch to help his balance, but the prosthetic leg that Jack made for him is attached to his body. Michael presses his lips together, holding eye-contact, and then turns back to Jack.

“What could possibly be so hard about opening a door?” he says under his breath, more to himself than Jack, and then pushes him aside to open the door himself.

Jack flips him off, but gets inside.

“I’ll be right back,” Michael tells them, and starts walking Dennis’ way.

When there’s just about two feet between them, Michael stops. He can’t come up with the words, and can’t explain how strangled he feels. Looking at Dennis makes him think of Daryl left with Halsey in the house but, in a way, left alone. He’d say that, just to have something to say, but Dennis speaks first.

“I just came over to thank Jack for the leg and the hearing aid,” he says, flatly.

Michael raises his eyebrows with a small smile. “Hearing aid? For Tati? He hadn’t told me he was working on that too. That’s nice. Does she like it?”

Dennis lifts his shoulders. “She’s still getting used to it. It needs to be readjusted a lot, but Mom can do it. She’s learning fast,” he trails off, looking over Michael’s shoulder, to the jeep. 

He does too, and then his eyes return to Dennis. 

“We’re going to find them.”

Dennis nods slowly, carefully, like he isn’t so sure about that, but is still somewhat glad that Michael’s confident. “You have to bring Ashton back to Harry,” he says, “it’s destroying him.”

Michael opens and closes his mouth. He would love that. He’d love to bring all forty-six back from the dead, real-Nathan and Annika included.

“I’ll do my best. We all will.”

Dennis gives him a look, serious and firm. “I don’t want to believe Dad didn’t make it, but Mom told me he didn’t. So there’s that for me to deal with. But Ashton? You have to save him. You’re no good for a savior if you can’t save one person.”

Michael tries to smile, even though the weight on his chest grows heavier.

“Okay.”

Dennis nods again. “Don’t fail.”

This time, he has to bite back a smile. “I promise I won’t.”

That seems to satisfy Dennis enough. He gives Michael one last look, as if he’s memorizing what he looks like, and then turns away. Michael’s stuck watching him for for a few seconds, before he turns away as well, and heads to the jeep, away from Death Valley.


	36. when the hours move to minutes and i'm seconds away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't believe michael's a committed [cosplayer](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/138276894635/hoodzer-gday-usa-january-28th-2016) of opia and decided to cut and dye his hair just like opia!michael. [this is beautiful](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/138273453685/suckmymichaelconda-god-has-blessed-us-today-my).

There’s a silent agreement that nobody should say a word as they leave the city. There’s too much emotional baggage and not enough preparation that would suggest they’ll be alive much longer after leaving, so all four of them stay quiet, looking different ways. Halsey’s eyes are ahead, as she drives slow enough that being with the headlights off doesn’t cause any real problem. Jason has something that Michael still hasn’t taken a good look at that stays in his lap, and he keeps himself entertained with the little box -- seems like an old type of radio, but no sound comes from it, or not in a frequency that Michael catches anyway. 

Jack and Michael share the backseats, but they’re as far from each other as could be. Jack’s glued to the window, one palm spread against the glass, eyes wide as he stares at everything he sees, and though he isn’t entirely sure whether Jack is that impressed about everything that he hadn’t been allowed to see for the past years, or that he’s just keeping his headlights off like Geordie is, just another strategy for keeping eyes off himself, Michael just doesn’t care.

He’s got his own reasons to be quiet, after all.

His guess is that none of them had returned to the jeep before Geordie took it away to where most of the cars stay parked, before the proper city begins, away to not rob them of any illuminated space. The first thing he saw when he got in the car was the blanket he used to wrap tightly around himself to feel safe.

Now as they leave town for good, he’s holding onto the thing. It’s a bit dusty, he bets, but not enough that he can keep his fingers from shaking just a bit as he traces lazy patterns against it, with his head dropped, staring at the thing.

His eyes well up, and something occurs to him.

They’re officially outside the city perimeter now, and Geordie turns on the headlights. The illuminated path ahead is what’s left of the underground place, moving towards the elevation to start upward to where the human village should be.

He starts feeling under his seat. There’s another blanket there, one thicker and that’s definitely dusty, but that’s not what he’s looking for. He holds his breath, still feeling the floor of the car, wrinkling his nose again and again until finally his fingers grasp at something.

His eyes light up, and he smiles.

Jack gives him a weird look, borderline disgusted, because Michael’s getting too close to him. Michael shoves him aside, even closer to the window, and just as Jack starts to complain, Michael grabs what he had felt, and comes back to his seat with the thing in his hands.

Luke’s goggles.

He knew they’d left it in the car. Must’ve dropped to the floor when Geordie turned the keys on the ignition and started driving.

For a long moment, he just looks at it, both of his palms spread, excitement making its way to his face, spreading like a disease on his face. He’s not supposed to feel happy, not about this and not at all, but he is. Because he’s going to bring this back to his boyfriend, who’s alive. Who must be. Who’ll be magically safe, too.

Jack’s looking at him differently now, blinking slowly, like he’s not sure what to do with himself.

Geordie gives him one look through the rearview mirror, but nothing more.

He cleans the lenses as well as he can with the blanket; puts the goggles on top of his head.

Nobody dares tell him he shouldn’t.

* * *

The direction isn’t really that difficult to follow: they’re supposed to move northeast until they see the closest thing to mountains as the region is supposed to offer, maybe just hills, and then they go north until they find Luke, or at least his tracker.

Thankfully, Geordie knows the mountains Jack talked about. Said they’re rock formations in the middle of the desert, and it’s difficult to keep a low profile traveling in a place as open as that, but the night’s just starting and they don’t need more than four hours to get there, and from there to the place they’re actually supposed to, shouldn’t be more than an hour or two.

If they’re lucky, they’re there before dawn.

The first thing anyone says is about twenty minutes after they left. They’re still in the woods but not as deep, and every now and then they pass a cave. Jack looks at everything like he’s a child impressed by the city lights the day before Christmas. Michael recognizes the look because that’s exactly what he looked like when he first got to the capital, all those years ago.

It’s Jason who speaks, after taking a deep breath of satisfaction. “It’s working.”

“What is?” Geordie asks, without taking her eyes off the road.

“It’s an electronic compass,” he says, holding it up for Geordie to see. Michael sees her raising her eyebrows, and then make an abrupt turn right. “I know you can reach the rock formations just fine, but it’ll be useful for after, right?”

Michael smiles quietly, says, “Thanks.”

Geordie presses her lips together and is quiet for a while. 

“That was your Grandpa’s. You shouldn’t have brought it.”

Jason rolls his eyes, and then sets the compass on top of the center console, where Geordie can see it as she drives. Michael watches the compass needle for a few seconds, mesmerized by the object he’s never seen before. “It’s not like it was working anyway,” Jason says, and then: “He would’ve wanted us to take it. Especially now.”

Geordie doesn’t say anything.

Michael adjusts the goggles on top of his head. They’re heavy, but not in a bad way.

“Are you going north to find the other human village when we’re done here?” Michael asks.

Jack snorts to his side, and Michael glares at him. 

Geordie shrugs, says, “Maybe.”

For Jason, it takes some more time to decide. He gives Geordie long looks that aren’t reciprocated, and eventually he says: “I don’t know. Ilana didn’t trust them, and I trusted Ilana. Diana’s mother?” he tries, looking over his shoulder. Michael nods. He never met the woman, was dead in the village attack, but he’s heard plenty about her and her leadership. “So I don’t know. If we make it out alive, we can make plans. For now, the plan is surviving.”

He smirks, like that’s an incredible adventure.

But his eyes still look broken, like that’s all make believe.

Michael still smiles back.

“Well, I, for one,” Jack says, raising his eyebrows and looking away from the window to look back at each and every one of the other people in the car. “Am set on taking my brother and running away from you people,” he pauses, smiling. Jason gives him an unimpressed look, and Geordie continues to ignore the whole conversation. “Especially you,” Jack says, looking at Michael, but almost smiling, like he sees absolutely nothing wrong in what he just said.

Michael stares at him.

“Out of curiosity,” Jason says, making a face and lifting his shoulders. “Why did you bring him?”

“Wasn’t about to let Luke not have his brother,” he starts, maintaining eye contact with Jack for another second, before looking away. “Even if his brother _is_ a dick.”

“Offense not taken,” Jack says, looking out the window again.

“I really don’t care,” Michael tells him. 

Jason snorts. Geordie shakes her head with a small smile.

“Hey,” she says, “I think this will be the last adventure my jeep will see.”

Michael raises his eyebrows, looking at her, but her eyes are ahead in the road, focused on the clearing ahead, absolutely set on not looking at anyone. Her comment sends a wave of discomfort, Michael thinks, but nobody dares say a word for a while. 

He remembers first seeing the jeep when he was jumping out of the window of the Order prison, his fall slowed down by Halsey’s telekinesis and enormous control of the air. The car had been a sight of hope. He was sure he was being taken to Karen, then, especially when he spotted Halsey’s Order magick. Order-born, but not Order, she’d say.

The car turned to hope to his second prison, and, by the time they were found in room 93, Geordie coming back for them with the very same jeep was a heavenly experience. With its big road-dirty wheels, she killed the person who’d been shooting at Luke. Michael was sure he was going to make his first kill, then. A part of him had been relieved -- then, of course, breaking Ashton out of prison not full twenty-four hours later inked his hands in blood anyway.

Still, it had been an important delay to the loss of his innocence, he thinks.

The jeep. He likes it a lot.

It’s Jason who speaks first, sighing loudly, saying: “If you die, I call dibs on the jeep.”

Michael chuckles lowly, and surprisingly, so does Jack. By Jason’s side, Geordie gives him an offended look, and punches his shoulder. He pretends like it hurts more than it probably does, making a scene of holding the hurt spot and growling in pain, but that only makes her laugh too.

God, he hopes they all make it.

* * *

As they keep heading closer to their destination, it also gets colder. Michael’s in a gray sweatshirt that doesn’t really give much room for feeling cold, Geordie in a big black coat, and Jason in a sweatshirt with a few holes from being too worn out, but looking like it’s doing its job of keeping Jason safe from shivers anyway.

Jack, on the other hand, who didn’t expect to be extracted from his laboratory and away from the warm underground city, is only in a T-shirt. Michael notices when he first raises his shoulders and wraps his arms around himself, in silence. He looks out the window, so Michael can’t see his face, so Michael tries to ignore it, too.

Biting back exasperation, he stares at the blanket covering his legs, and holds onto it.

“I’m hungry,” Jack complains.

“There’s food in the trunk of the car,” Geordie says, absentmindedly.

“That we’re not going to eat,” Jason says, turning to look at Jack and Michael. “Seriously. I don’t care how hungry you are. We don’t know how long we have to travel. It’s been what? One hour? That’s too soon to start attacking our food supply.”

“One hour and eighteen minutes,” Geordie says, glancing their way through the rearview mirror. 

He doesn’t look to see if she’s wearing a watch or there’s a clock on the car of whatever it is. It only makes him want to smile, that she’s probably as nervous as he is with this trip, counting down the minutes, only she’s better at hiding it. Not that he doesn’t think he’s doing a fine job, because he does think he is -- he’s keeping his cool and only adjusting the goggles on top of his head a couple of times, touching it lightly as if his hands could break it.

It’s tough, trying to do a good job at keeping it together.

He’s both excited and impossibly nervous.

Jack gives Jason a disgusted expression, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference to Jason. He turns back and throws his feet over the console of the car. Jack rolls his eyes and brings his legs up, trying to become even smaller, all so he won’t feel cold.

Michael bites the insides of his mouth, and looks away from him, and out the window.

* * *

“If you go through with this,” Calum tells him, “I’ll _never_ forgive you.”

He sounds desperate enough that it’s startling, shocking in its own. Boys like him are supposed to make everyone jealous of how bright they are. There’s a light that shines within them and that floods to the outside as well. They keep their chins tilted up and a constant smile on their faces, even when they’re stoic and quiet. 

Calum wasn’t built for panicked wide eyes and desperation heavy in his voice.

At first, Michael thought it was just hatred, and he would’ve been correct in that, too, but only partially, because it’s more than that. It’s much more. It’s shame and disgust and most importantly, it’s fear. It’s fear so paralyzing and deep that it makes his jaw look sharper and his expression unmoving even as it breaks.

Michael’s standing in front of Calum. Calum is on his knees and Michael’s bending to be on his eye-level. His eyes are green but it still looks like they’re thick with magick. He’s far away and removed from reality, but at the same time, he’s so present that he knows he’ll never forget this, not if he lives to be a million years old.

There’s blood down Calum’s lips, chin, like he’s just spat it down on the ground. His clothes ragged and dirty with blood, his hands, too. His veins are dark like they’re still drinking in poison, like he took a hit of some drug that went wrong in his system. He’s broken. 

Michael shakes his head, then bites his tongue in disgust as well, because Calum doesn’t get it.

“Good. Then you’ll know what it’s like. I never forgave you, either.”

It’s the same scene that The Trinity showed him when he was locked with her in her cell, but this time, there’s something else he catches. Joy Hood, standing behind her son, looking past Michael and Calum, away to something else that is happening in the room they’re in at the same time that Calum and Michael trade soul-burning insults. There’s something in her eyes that can’t be read. She’s narrowing them, as if trying to get the image into better focus, but that is all Michael can catch, because this isn’t now yet. This is the future.

And he can feel what it’s like to be him then. 

He can feel the rigidness of his muscles, especially his shoulders, and how he’s conflicted between wanting to follow Joy’s eyes and keep his eyes on Calum, because Calum… Calum doesn’t get to tell him he’ll never forgive Michael. 

Calum’s a fool. 

The anger boiling inside of him, it makes him wrinkle his nose at the sight of complete desperation in the eyes of the boy he used to love. The anger is, in fact, so solid that it sounds like something he’s chewing on, something dissolving into his system faster and faster.

The world he sees isn’t blurry but it’s foggy, like he can’t see very far, but all that he can see is there for the taking. What he can see is his. He will take it indeed.

He raises his eyebrows in surprise when he sees Calum’s eyes well up fast, the tears coming only after the choking sound that comes from his throat. There’s a part of him, big and ugly and gawking at his insides, that tells him to stop, that this is wrong, that everything about this is. That he should kneel down next to him and implore for forgiveness, and hug him and kiss his cheek and say that he’s still the boy Calum once knew.

But that part doesn’t know anger, and anger is contagious.

Anger takes and takes and takes.

He bilnks only once, and that instinct is gone.

There’s something soothing about the madness that comes over when he keeps his eyebrows raised, but the meaning is different. The madness is an accomplice to the anger, so he’ll keep it around, too, not by choice but because there’s no other way.

And this is when he understands, remembering the future.

That there’s something off about him, and the answer in his eyes.

Not rolled back, not yet, but the thickness is there all the same. He’ll take Opia.

* * *

Michael wakes up with a start, blinking a couple of times and sitting straighter.

Geordie’s pulling over but the night’s still way too dark and there isn’t any sign of other cars on the road. Jason’s yawning loudly next to her, and Jack’s eyes are out the window, body turned away from him and shaking lightly.

He reaches under his seat for the bedsheet that has inside most of his belongings that had felt worth taking, and feels for the box that Jack had given him. It’s still untouched inside. 

He breathes out heavily, relief filling his veins. He’s not sure why exactly -- it shouldn’t feel good to know that a future like that is guaranteed. In those split seconds that take for the rest of the car to realize he’s awake, he considers his possibilities, and just getting rid of the drug. But the irony of knowing the future, or at least an aspect of it, is that he still can’t do nothing to change it, not really. Because he can’t just throw the drug away, not when he knows of its power. 

Michael doesn’t know what’s ahead of them. He needs to be prepared.

Then he thinks, as Jack turns to look at him and so does Jason, that maybe this is where they’re headed: somehow to the Hood family, that inexplicably took Luke and hopefully others, Ashton included. That he’ll take Opia to break Luke free and then he’ll do some shit he’ll regret for years to come, but he’ll do what he has to do. And he knows it won’t matter: he’d do anything to see Luke free.

“We’re just changing drivers,” Jason tells him with a small smile. “Geordie’s a bit sleepy, so I’ll take the wheel,” he winks.

Michael smiles back on instinct, just because it’s hard not to smile at Jason, but he means nothing by it. His head is still going fast in all the most horrible directions, being angry that The Trinity even showed him something like that to start with, that she predicts the future at all.

As Geordie and Jason both leave the car, he takes a look at Jack.

“You’re freezing, aren’t you,” he half-states, half-asks.

Jack shrugs, but he is. He’s shaking a bit, looking oddly small, with his legs still pulled up and arms going around his knees as if he hopes to keep himself warm. Michael bites the insides of his cheeks, for a second swearing in his head, practicing all the bad words he knows.

And then he pulls the blanket from over his legs, and shoves it in Jack’s general direction.

The blanket that he considers his, but is technically Luke’s.

It feels only fair. If he gets the goggles until Luke comes back, then Jack should have the blanket. Even if his selfishness tells him otherwise.

Wordlessly, Jack takes the blanket.

He doesn’t thank Michael because he must know who it belonged to. He doesn’t even look at him, because he must know what Michael doesn’t: about the fairness of it, or how none of anything that’s ever happened to any of them is fair at all. He just accepts the blanket, wraps it around himself, and goes back to looking out the window.

Soon Jason starts driving, and Geordie lets her head rest against the window, and Michael tells himself it doesn’t matter anymore.

Something’s said then, but Michael doesn’t get it, and turns towards Jack, blinking a couple of times, frowning a bit. At first he thinks Jack may have thanked him for the blanket, but his face isn’t heavy with gratitude. It’s heavy with doubt and just a bit of distrust, as usual by now.

“That’s not my good ear,” he points at his right ear, the one closer to Jack. He turns more towards him, so he’s facing him and his left ear is closer. “You’ll have to say it again.”

Michael hasn’t properly looked in the mirror since before the explosion. He’s been avoiding them like the plague, only a quick glance when he’s brushing his teeth; in the faint reflection of glasses before he sees what he’s looking at and can look away. So he doesn’t know exactly just how bad he looks, with the absence of sleep making his eyes deeper; he isn’t sure how visible the scar on his neck is, even if he traces it lightly with his fingers when he’s taking a shower. He just touches the end of his cut ear to make sure it’s scarring well, that if he dies it’ll be for something, not because of a dumb infection.

But Jack may see something that the mirror would show if he just looked.

His eyes glance at Michael’s ear, and he presses his lips together, like he’s stopping the thoughts that come from rolling out his tongue. In Michael’s head, he can think of a handful: does it still hurt? (Yes and no.) What do you listen to and do you feel like dying when you realize a part of you is gone? (He listens to as much as he can and often it’s not enough, and he does feel like dying sometimes, but it has more to do with the part of him that is gone that is not physical.) Does it hurt more to grieve the loss of others or the loss of a sense? (About the same, but he’d like to fool himself into thinking other people’s lives are way more important than him holding onto his five sense. But he’s way too smart for fooling himself anyway, or just inapt for fooling people in general.) Would you rather you bled to death instead of being stitched back together uglily? (He’d have to properly look into a mirror to know.) How much sleep are you getting, if any? (He is, just not a lot.) Did your eardrum explode beyond repair or was the acoustic reception cut when the shape of your ear changed forever? (Yes. And yes.)

Jack clears his throat a bit awkwardly.

“I asked if you’re gonna keep on making those weird sounds whenever you sleep.”

Michael raises his eyebrows.

Jason finds Michael in the rearview mirror. “I think that’s his way of asking you if you’re alright after the nightmares you were probably having, but what do I know,” he shrugs, smirking.

Michael loves that Jason’s full-on smirk is back, if anything for now.

Geordie laughs weakly, but she’s trying to fall asleep.

Jason rolls his eyes exaggeratedly, snorting.

“Not hating me and wanting what’s best for Luke are not mutually exclusive,” he notes. Jack doesn’t give him any reaction, so he goes on. “I don’t know, I just keep having the same stupid dream,” he runs his hand over his head, on the shaven sides, one at a time. He has Jason’s full attention too, so he adds: “It’s dumb stuff, though. I just can’t stop it from happening.”

“Dumb stuff,” Jason repeats, slowly. Then, louder and with a joking smile on his lips, he asks something that’s meant to sound like a joke but doesn’t read like one: “Whatever you dreaming about, that’s not gonna get us killed or anything, is it?”

Michael doesn’t know. So he just shrugs.

“Great, good to know,” Jason sighs, eyes back on the road.

Abnormally, Michael hears Jack laugh at that.

* * *

Michael doesn’t fall asleep again, but Jack does, not long after that. With the blanket to wrap himself around, he relaxes and in no time he’s snoring softly, with his head resting against the window, not much different than Geordie in the front seat. Jason and Michael seem to both enjoy the silence for the minutes it lasts, and then, when it’s safe that they are indeed just the two awake, Jason tells him:

“You see that?” he asks, without pointing at anything. Michael comes closer so he can see the windshield, and he sees what he means. The rock formations they were talking about are ahead, still small in the distance, but visible anyway. Around it, the dark nothing “My guess is twenty minutes and we’re changing course. It’s not going to be much longer.”

Michael breathes out heavily.

“That’s a good thing. We’re coming closer.”

Jason doesn’t say anything for a moment. His voice comes out a bit strangled when he speaks next. “Look, I don’t mean this in a condescending way, but you’re not used to traveling like Geordie and I are. You don’t know what it’s like, especially in a desert like this,” he sighs. Michael bites the insides of his cheeks but lets him go on. “It’s cold at night. The further north we go, the colder it’ll be. But come the morning, it’s so hot you’ll feel like you’re frying. Any animal you’ll come across wants to eat you, and you’ll wish they come, because the alternative is people, and they may not want to eat you, but they’ll try to capture you anyway.”

Michael cocks an eyebrow. “Vultures?”

Chuckling lowly, he shakes his head. “Not Vultures, prince. We’re not talking government-brainwashed kids aiming guns at you because they think you’re evil. We’re talking people like me and Geordie.”

That gives Michael pause.

“Assassins?”

“Sort of.”

Frowning, his eyes go to Geordie, as if she could explain, but she’s fast asleep, trusting and relaxed. On the other side of the backseat, Jack looks the same, just clinging to the blanket, probably still a bit cold even with it. He doesn’t look back at Jason, though, because it feels too much. He lets his gaze go to outside the car, the cold sand on both sides of the road that continues indefinitely. 

“I thought you were the last humans in the south. A woman told me, in Death Valley, that there were only the two of you, humans living mindlessly in the city, working for Order, and then the village in the north.”

“That’s right,” he says, then sighs once more. “Look, they’ve never aligned with Chaos or Order. They’re killers, but they’re more bounty hunters than assassins. They’ll turn on their own people for money, keep you captured until there’s a price in your head, for as long as you live without taking from their food supply. But more than that, more than anything, they’re human. And there are rumors… people talk about it sometimes. Countries in South America where humans with great technology managed to eradicate witches instead. Sent them back to the shadows, and they rule unquestioningly, living their lives as if they never had to deal with witches at all. There’s not a lot of magick that can fight a bullet to the head, and no witch is immortal.”

“I hate that.”

Jason turns to look over his shoulder very briefly, with a frown on his face. “What?”

“The word _eradicate_ ,” he says, looking away, “like any race is some sort of disease or plague. That’s what you eradicate. Not people.”

Jason doesn’t apologize for his choice of words.

“Anyway, what I’m saying is that sometimes, they’ll kill just for the sake of killing. Because they think they should find a way to get the country back to its original glory, two hundreds year ago, when witches were too scared to come out of their hiding spots and lived like humans,” he says. “I’ve met a few, when I was on missions with Diana and Geordie, but Diana especially, because Diana was the only one among us that didn’t fear them. And you know what? I’m a smart guy. I know my limits. And I know to stay away from people like them,” he says slowly, then adds: “Ilana was the only one who kept in touch, because she was the human leader. I don’t know where she stood with them; doesn’t matter anyway, since she’s dead.”

Michael thinks of asking where does he stand in all this. If he thinks the country is better off without any witches, that they should be _eradicated_ just like they’ve been doing to humans for the last couple of years, constantly getting caught in the cross-fired between Order and Chaos. But he doesn’t ask that. Instead, he asks:

“Alright, so you’re warning me about them because they may know I’m a witch if we see them?”

Jason shakes his head, but it takes him a moment to reply.

“I think they know about you, Michael.”

Michael wishes he had the good humor to say something witty and joke about all the things that are to know about him. He’s positive that’s what Jason would do if the roles were reversed. But he can’t bring himself to do anything of the sort. Instead he clears his throat and feels himself sink in the backseat a bit further, like he’ll disappear if he keeps at this rate.

He feels like there isn’t a single person in the country that doesn’t know about the stupid prophecy. As if he was the last one to know, and it makes him angry.

Adjusting the goggles that don’t need any adjusting on top of his head just to have something to do with his hands, he asks: “What do they care if I find a way to free Chaos witches from Death Valley? Isn’t there some sort of gratitude going on because Daryl had that human village and supposedly protected humans before Order came ‘round?”

Jason chuckles. “They don’t give a shit about us, or about humanity. They don’t want to take the country back from witches because they feel there’s been injustice to their race. They want to do it because they’re sick of not having the power anymore. These people weren’t regular Joes. They come from families that had everything, and now their names stand for nothing.”

“Well--”

“No, listen,” Jason cuts him off, “they care because they think you’re the Messiah for change, only not a change they’re down for. I remember Diana talking about it, how you coming to Death Valley meant bad things for us, because the second you claimed a place for Chaos in society, Chaos and Order together would find a way to end us once and for all, like the inconvenience we always were.”

Michael looks at him, frowning. “You don’t think…”

This time Jason doesn’t interrupt him. Jason waits for him to finish, but he doesn’t.

Michael remembers the first human he ever saw, a girl in the village he and Karen used to live before the city. He remembers being young and loving car toys, and looking her in the and feeling like she was different, but not so much that it explained the way things were. He didn’t know that was what it had felt like then, though, just the discomfort that looking at her brought.

He does remember Karen’s words, though.

_Humans aren’t as intelligent or resourceful as us. Because they aren’t organized, they die easily. Their society has always been fragile, weak. Don’t feel bad for them, though._

_It’s not your fault they are the way they are._

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Jason says, finally. “They’re not many, though, and they mostly stick to the desert, because it’s hard traveling here with the major changes in weather. If you go north there’s the city, if you go south there’s Death Valley, buried in the rare forests. So they’re not something to be worried about in the _grand scheme_ of things,” he rolls his eyes, shrugging. “But as much as I loved Diana, she parroted a lot of what Ilana said. If she said the things she did, Ilana didn’t have a good feeling about your arrival. And if she didn’t, I’m afraid none of the people that we may see would. And, you know, here’s their home.” 

Michael raises his eyebrows, making a pout, and lets his head drop back. 

Staring at the ceiling of the car, he snorts.

“Well,” he repeats, going back to what he was going to say before. “Fuck”

Jason laughs quietly, nodding. “Fuck.”

* * *

Jason pulls over and out of the road when they reach the rock formation Michael hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off. He opens the door and steps out, stretching and yawning and turning his head from one side to the other. Michael watches him for a second before he wakes up both Jack and Geordie, not sure what else to do but that.

Geordie sighs heavily when she realizes where they are, and checks the compass. 

Jack turns to him with a frown. “I hate sleeping in cars,” he informs.

Michael half-smiles. “C’mon, I suspect this is the pissing break,” he points towards Jason, who’s already taken the liberty of walking a few steps ahead. His back is to the jeep, but what he’s doing is clear enough.

Jack nods, unwrapping himself from the blanket to leave the car.

He must shiver when he gets out of the car, because his shoulders lift as if by instinct, and he swears loudly a couple of times before walking away a respectable amount of steps. That leaves Geordie and Michael alone in the car.

“Aren’t you leaving too?” she asks.

“Wanted to make sure you were okay first.”

She snorts. “I’m okay. I’m good. I’m fine.”

He cocks an eyebrow, staring at the back of her neck.

“I know my parents won’t be there,” she starts, still not looking at Michael. “But I’m a bit scared of what may be.” She pauses, sighs softly, and Michael’s fingers touch the side of his neck and his scar lightly. Geordie finally does turn to look at him, one arm wrapping around the headrest of her seat. “Aren’t you?”

She doesn’t sound curious, just worried.

Michael presses his lips together for a moment before he replies. “I guess I’m way too desperate to find him to think about that. I can’t function in a world where he doesn’t exist, so I’ll think about what we’re actually chasing later.”

Geordie’s big brown eyes are disapproving, but she refrains from saying something else. She turns back ahead, opens the door of her car, and says: “Alright.”


	37. dropping glasses just to hear them break

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !!!! oh god. a few words away from 250k, can i just have thirty seconds to tell you that i'm really, really excited about where this is going? about all that's lead them here, and all that's coming in the future too? thank you so much for the continuous support. i truly believe that when you put something out there in the world, it ceases to be just yours, and then it belongs to a community. so thank you for being part of this community. thank you so, so much, for caring enough about this story that you make it yours too. with beautiful art or mixes, putting your own interpretation into the story and characters, or by commenting and letting me know what you like! or really, just by reading. if you're here, you're part of this, and i have to thank you. if you're here, this story is yours too.
> 
> the wonderful worldofchances2giveu made a mood board for opia, and you should [check it out](http://witchmikey.tumblr.com/post/138666172455/worldofchances2giveu-fanfic-inspired-moodboard)! :3

After two hours driving, they get somewhere. The compass tells them it should be their destination, and yet they're all frowning and looking at each other suspiciously. There won't be long until dawn, but for now there's both the darkness and the cold to take into consideration. 

Jason raises his eyebrows and says, “It's here.”

“Supposedly,” Geordie adds. 

Michael looks around, as much as being inside the jeep will allow him. It's an abandoned place, debris decorating old buildings that have lost full stories, pieces of things that were once monuments and now he can't make the shape of what they're supposed to mean. There are towers that expand further into the desert to their opposite side, gigantic metal worms broken in several places. Michael’s never seen anything like it.

In the entrance, where they've parked a few meters away in awkward silence, is a big arc. On the top, the words WELCOME TO THE FUTURE have all letters intact, but the ink in each of them is faded enough that Michael has to narrow his eyes to try and have a better look. 

There's no electricity apparent, nothing to differentiate one ruined place to the next. After the arc there’s a way down in pavement that seems to be in better shape than the roads they’ve been traveling for the past hours. The way down is steep, coming to an ample circular place where fallen trees and countless big rocks encounter, arms of what the place once was all meeting there.

“What do you think?” Jack asks, a little unsure. 

Michael’s not entirely sure when he became the leader of this mission, if they are to think of this as one. He blinks a couple of times, looking at Jack, unused to the vulnerability that comes with that simple quiet question. He looks at Jason and Geordie, too, waiting for them to cut him off with some assessment of the situation, but they're quiet, waiting for Michael to speak, just like Jack. 

He can't hear much past the car, but he'd bet there's not much sound coming from the ghost town. He presses his lips together and rolls down the window, under the watchful eyes of the three other people in the car. 

At least the front of the city doesn't smell to fire or war. There's a faint but distinguishable smell to war, he's come to notice, even when there's no fire: it's rotten and acid and easily confused with deteriorating corpses. But it's different, its own terrible fragrance, and this place doesn't have it. If anything, he can smell something else. Something weird but familiar.

“I think someone's cooking something.”

“Let's hope the meal isn't our people,” Jason says quietly. Jack glares at him, but he just shrugs. “You know what this place is?”

Michael doesn’t look away from the little he can see, how the weirdly shaped buildings expand in the distance, and seem to fall down as well. He shakes his head no, blinking a couple of times.

“It’s an amusement park,” Jason says, chuckling lowly. Geordie swears under her breath, but neither Jack nor Michael seem to understand what he means. “It’s like, shit, well,” he pauses. Michael turns to look at him, and he’s frowning, unsure on how to explain it. “There used to be those parks with these rides. That’s a rollercoaster right there,” he points at the biggest metal worm, “or was once, anyway. I’m sure there are carousels and all sorts of things if we go in.”

“What’s the point?” Jack asks, and it sounds like he’s snapping, which can’t have been his intention, because he adds: “The purpose of amusement parks, I mean, not going in. I know why we should, obviously.”

To Jason’s side, Geordie stares at Jack. “To amuse.”

Michael and Jason both share a look of appreciation for her. Geordie keeps looking at Jack, and Jack’s frown eventually leaves to give place for a stare back. 

“They banished it after the witches came to power,” Jason explains, since Geordie clearly won’t. “Imagine a twelve year old witch that can control metal, a hundred meters up in the air, and then their magick starts blossoming, still out of control. The witch accidentally breaks the metal. Fifty people die at once. That’s not counting the casualties of the people who were on the ground.”

“Is that an example of why amusement parks are a bad idea for the world we live in now, or history?” Jack asks, by Michael’s side, sounding surprisingly interested. 

Jason gives him a pressed smile. It says enough.

“Okay,” Geordie rubs her hands together, looking out the windshield. “Your call, Michael. Do we go in or back away and go back to driving? Maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet, wherever Luke’s piercing ended up.”

Michael presses his lips together, considering his options.

Without electricity, it’s difficult to see anything past what the low headlights will show them, and they’re still far away enough from the proper entrance that there isn’t much past the ghosts of what buildings, towers, and rollercoasters used to be. But the smell, even though Michael can’t identify it exactly, is something familiar, and definitely not a smell of the desert. At least one person must be around, but considering how many places there are to hide in The Future, Michael would count on more.

Maybe they’re just bounty hunters, and the possibility makes Michael’s heart ache. Having gotten all this far to end up finding Luke’s piercing just stolen and around the lip of somebody else would make Michael’s skin crawl. 

But Luke can’t stay dead, so he won’t let his mind go there.

“Let's go,” he says.

Jason looks at him. “It doesn't look like there's anyone in there.”

“But there is,” he answers, without looking away from the arc, from what's after it. He doesn't add out loud, but in his head he does: Luke is. Hopefully Ashton. Not Joel and not Geordie’s parents, but hopefully there are others too. 

“Alright,” Geordie says, turning off the headlights. “Let’s go in quietly, then.”

Michael nods. Jason turns back so he’s facing the windshield. And Jack gives Michael one very brief look that Michael can’t bring himself to decode. It makes him nervous, but he can’t pinpoint why, so instead of showing it, he says: “My jaw still hurts, and my stomach’s green.”

Jack frowns, like he doesn’t know why Michael would say such a thing. 

Like he remembers, just doesn’t understand what Michael’s point is.

He doesn’t, either.

Geordie starts the car again.

The car goes slow at first, Geordie driving it towards the entrance, but as soon as it’s past the arc, something happens. Geordie lets out a strangled noise as she tries making a turn, and Michael frowns, grabbing the side of the door to steady himself, as the car starts spinning.

“I can’t control it!” she yells, but Michael isn’t fully listening.

His heart starts beating fast enough that it muffles out all the other noises. The car spins on its way down, completely out of control, and Michael can’t believe they’ve come this far to die in a stupid car accident down the steep of an amusement park entrance. He holds his breath and can’t bring himself to blink. He watches through the windshield mirror as they spin and spin and spin.

And his head spins and spins and spins too.

It’s only a few seconds, but it expands in his head so much that he can’t breathe. He can’t breathe at all and he tells himself Luke would look him in the eye and _order_ him to breathe, because it’s something he can do. So he gasps for air and keeps his mouth open as he heaves, and his chest goes up and down even though it still doesn’t feel as if oxygen is reaching his brain.

They fall abruptly on something, and there’s a small sound as they land out of the careful pavement that would bring them inside the park. They land to the side, onto something that flattens the tires almost immediately. Geordie swears loudly, and tries to get the car to stop, but all they do is spin more.

Michael’s hands start shaking, and his eyes hurt from being so widely open, but at least he’s still probably breathing, because he hasn’t passed out yet. 

He gives Geordie one look through the rearview mirror, and when their eyes connect, something passes between them. It’s not desperation, but complete disbelief. None of them can bring themselves to accept that after so much that has happened between when they first saw each other, Michael brought unwillingly into this very jeep, Geordie giving him looks of contempt, they’re going to die. 

The jeep turns, falling to the side just as abruptly, and when it does, Michael’s as glad for the seat belt as he hates it. It burns into his skin, his body jerking forward and the seat belt holding him back. He ricochets and when the car lands on its side, a proper gasp escapes his lips as his body starts to collide against the front seat, and then back, unable to go all the way.

The car has stopped, and the smell that Michael had felt before is clearer now: it’s oil.

The entrance was covered in oil, and they must’ve landed on something that flattened the tires. Such an obvious trap for any visitors that Michael feels stupid for not having considered it. 

But stupidity is not his knee-jerk reaction. His knee-jerk reaction is to keep breathing even if it’s hard and it burns his throat, eyes still wide but vision out of focus. His whole body shaking but trembling hands coming to his seat belt to touch it, just to make sure it’s still there. The seat belt still holds him back, but to his side, there’s just the ground. He can smell the earth to his right shoulder, wet.

It’s starting to rain.

He coughs a couple of times, unfastening his seat belt. His body falls to the ground but just a couple of inches. It still hurts, but just his sore muscles, not because of the small fall. He can’t leave through his door, and the thought is claustrophobic.

Just as he starts breathing in and out too rapidly, he asks: “Is everyone okay?”

“Yeah,” Jason says. “Let’s…” he trails off, looking at his side.

“I’m fine,” Geordie says, sharply, like she’s offended at the way Jason’s looking at her, whichever way that might be. 

Michael presses his lips together to try and stop him from breathing so out of rhythm, and tries touching Jack’s shoulder. Jack looks at him, wide-eyed, but doesn’t reply. “Jack’s okay too,” he answers, frowning a bit. Jack keeps staring at him, like he may correct Michael, but doesn’t.

“I can get out, and I’ll pull Geordie out. Jack, can you do the same?” Jason asks, but he doesn’t wait for a reply. 

Jason opens the passenger door first, unfastening his seat belt and climbing his way up, feet using the seat to prop himself up. Michael watches as much as he can with amazement, because if he’s amazed by Jason’s agility even as shock hasn’t fully sunk in yet, he won’t have time to panic. 

Jack blinks a couple of times, looking at the door to his side, but doesn’t look like he can do much. Michael knows he won’t.

The windows are mostly broken, and what isn’t broken is cracked enough to look dangerous. He’s sure all four of them will have cuts when they’re out of the jeep, but they all must leave anyway.

As Jason guides Geordie out, and she climbs out just as easily as Jason had, Michael does the best he can with his options. He gives Jack a look that he hopes seems reassuring, even as he isn’t sure himself of what he’s doing, and then stands up. Because of the angle of the turned sideways car and Jack still strapped tightly to his seat belt, Michael doesn’t have much space. He apologizes under his breath as he tries climbing up, and it’s Geordie who opens the door for him. He nods as she climbs down, and then he looks at Jack.

“I’m going to unfasten your seat belt,” he says, “but if you can’t stand, you’ll fall. So you need to hold onto something, alright?” 

Wordlessly, Jack nods.

One of his hands goes back to reach at the metal bars behind the jeep, the other goes straight for what he can hold of the open door exit. His eyes are big and terrified, and Michael doesn’t think he’s ever seen him like that, not even when he was crying and punching Michael in the face. 

He supposes nobody really wants to die.

“We’ll make it out, it’s okay, just be quick,” Michael says, and presses the big orange button that unfastens the seat belt. 

Jack’s body is tense enough that his body hardly moves when his weight is supported by his hands, but Michael helps him as much as he can, and then he’s out. Standing with a little bit more of space, Michael reaches down for the blanket first, throws it over the opening of the door so he won’t hurt himself as much climbing out, and then grabs the bedcloth wrap of clothes and, more importantly, the box with Opia and the modified adrenaline.

“Get the guns out of the jeep!” Michael yells at the three of them, and hear them move, hopefully for the trunk of the car, to get out.

He tries to climb up the way he’d seen Jason do, using the seats for his feet to find support, but it isn’t as easy as it looks like, especially with the beads of sweat collecting on his forehead. He frowns and keeps his eyes focused on the way out, telling himself that what he feels isn’t important, only what he does is. 

So long as he’s out of there in one piece, it doesn’t matter that he’s still scared.

_Are you scared?_

_Yes. All the time._

_Good. It’ll make you strong, give them all a reason to be scared._

With the blanket to help him climb up, he manages to bring both elbows out, pressing his weight against them to prop himself up. His foot misses the seat and he nearly loses his balance, teeth sinking deep on his bottom lip in the struggle to keep focused. It makes his jaw throb, still sore, but he doesn’t pay much attention to that. He breathes in and out and tries to not make it too intense, and though his arms burn, he manages to pull himself out through the passenger door.

He yanks the blanket back, and hugs the wrap of clothes and the box close to his chest as his feet land on the ground with a thud. 

The rain is thin, but the sky is dark, clouds heavy with more to come.

Michael’s heart is still beating too fast, and even if he can more or less control his breathing and tell his brain that he is, in fact, still doing it, he can’t do much about the heartbeats that threaten to break his chest, or how all sore spots of his body seem to be throbbing. He turns away from the car, afraid it might explode, the combination of turned sideways car and oil not the best combination.

He sees Geordie first, because she’s the only one still close to the jeep. “Let’s go,” he says, going around it, to see what she sees. What she sees is the car she’s always loved, always owned, destroyed.

“Geordie,” Jason hisses, urgently, but Geordie doesn’t move.

Michael sinks his teeth on his bottom lip, pulling her by her wrist. She goes, unwillingly but not putting up much of a fight, and though it turns out it isn’t inflammable and the car doesn’t go up in flames like the movies, it’s still eerie and draining, watching it from a distant, seeing the car that had brought them there sideways. A little before it, just over the steep way they fell from, there’s a circle of retractable spikes. 

“They don’t want us here,” Geordie says, looking at them slowly. Michael sets his jaw when he looks at her closer; he sees what Jason must’ve seen when the car first turned over. With the collision against the ground, the window must’ve broken on her shoulder. It’s bleeding, soaking dark red, but her slight frown, like she isn’t entirely there, is worse than the blood. “Someone doesn’t, anyway.”

“I’m sorry I told us to go in,” Michael says, forcing himself to look away from Geordie.

He looks around, trying to assess the situation, but there are too many places they can go, and not enough light to make sure the moving shadows are just in his head. It’s an odd place in the middle of the desert, with trees coming from the middle of broken buildings and thorns coming around enormous rocks that dot around and keep going for as far as his eyes will let him see. Without the car, going anywhere could take up to an hour, he’s assuming, and he isn’t sure what to do about her injury.

“Not like there was any choice. This is the place,” Jack says.

His voice sounds broken too. Michael turns to him and his eyes must be desperate enough, because Jack frowns, pressing his lips together. He’s all pale, his arms ghostly white and shaking just a bit. Michael had forgotten he was underdressed for the desert. The rain can’t make it better. 

He’s about to try to come up with something for that, when Jason takes off his worn out sweatshirt. At first he thinks it’s for Jack, then he sees Jason rip a bigger hole on the sleeve, until he can rip it properly apart from the rest of the piece of clothing. Jason doesn’t even look at either one of them before he’s wrapping it around Geordie’s shoulder, ignoring the quiet cries that she lets out as she flinches away from his touch involuntarily. Voluntarily, she stays, even if her eyes keep looking back at the jeep.

“We’re sitting ducks here,” Jason says, finishing the improvised bandage, and then pulling the rest of his sweatshirt over his head. “We have to move.”

Michael nods quietly, but pauses, “Just a sec. It’s too cold, and if the rain picks up,” he shrugs. All three look at him, but Jason, the more alert of them, looks at him impatiently. Michael unwraps his things, and finds a hoodie that he throws in Jack’s general direction without looking. Jack doesn’t say thank you, just rushes to put it on, like he’s desperate for the possibility of warmth. Michael raises his eyes to Jason, then. “Want one?”

Jason shakes his head. “I’m fine with mine,” he says, though it’s ripped and lacking a sleeve. Michael wants to roll his eyes and tell him to suit himself, but they’ve wasted too much time already. He folds the blanket messily and puts it with his clothes and around the box, wraps it all back in a way that he can carry, and takes a deep breath. 

Geordie looks down, so Jason stays by her side and makes her look ahead. Michael wouldn’t know what other way to put it but that. As for Jack, he looks extremely busy with rubbing his arms, but Michael’s glad that he’s found something to focus on other than the shock and trauma of the spinning car. 

Michael’s head, for one, is still spinning.

He presses his lips together, points to the side that looks less scary, and hopes it isn’t the worst. 

The rain is just constant enough to be a bother, worsen the coldness, the thickness in the air, but it’s a storm that Michael fears. A lightning cuts the heavy dark clouds, and then they hear a thunder. Nobody looks up, and nobody stops walking. They all have enough to deal with in their heads without a storm to add to it.

The path he’s chosen for all of them follows what seems to have once been a proper trail, but now has too many rocks on the way to be considered one. Michael wouldn’t, anyway, as he frowns and struggles to keep balance with the things he’s carrying and moving forward.

He’s carrying the bedcloth wrap with some clothes, the adrenaline, and Opia. (And the blanket.) Geordie’s got two rifles, the straps of the guns crossing over her back and chest, one to each side. The only gun Michael saw on Jason was when he took the sweatshirt off and the shirt underneath rode up, and Michael saw a pistol on the waist of his jeans. 

As for Jack, he’s only carrying himself, but that’s enough for now.


	38. you could try and take us (but we're the gladiators)

“What is this place,” Jack mutters under his breath. 

It doesn’t sound like a question, so nobody answers. Michael assumes nobody would have an answer for it even if it were addressed like a proper question.

They continue forward, moving as fast as they can, for about half hour. The eventual lightning keeps cutting the sky with the thunder that comes right after, and the rain becomes thicker, fat raindrops making their hair and clothes wet, but not yet damp. They’re moving as fast as their feet will take them, heading nowhere specific, just as far away from the entrance of the park as possible, away from the people that are bound to come looking for the ones who fell for their trap.

The road closes with a fallen dry tree high enough that it cuts their path. There are too many rocks around, so they have two options: coming back, or finding a way to climb the trunk of the tree. It isn’t tall enough that it poses a real problem, but it looks like it was dragged there on purpose. Michael turns to look at the other three, and they seem to be considering the same thing.

“I’ll go first,” Jason says, taking the revolver Michael had seen before from the waist of his jeans. Michael presses his lips together, ready to argue, but Jason passes him and Jack, free hand touching the tree carefully. “If I shoot, run.”

“I like that plan,” Jack says, standing back.

It doesn’t sound like a good plan at all.

The rain makes shivers run up Michael’s spine all the time. It feels just like he imagined being in the middle of an abandoned alien-looking park just before dawn, with rain falling on his shoulders and panic building in his throat would feel like. His muscles seem to have decided on being tense enough that he barely feels any soreness, though, which is good. If he makes it out alive, he knows he’s in for a whole lot of pain when he finally relaxes back against a mattress -- or the floor -- and lets his body rest. His shoulder hit too strongly against the ground, but since the window was down, he didn’t really hurt himself. Geordie, though. He pauses, looking over his shoulder. She’s still looking at Jason, like he should too.

“I think I should go,” Michael tries, frowning and coming closer.

Jason gives one look at how Michael’s clinging to the wrap of sheets in his hands, and shakes his head with a small smirk. “I got this, prince.”

His wild curls don’t look so wild anymore, tamed by the water, and Michael can hardly see the freckles over his nose and cheeks, so much dirt his face’s gathered with the past hour. Michael sort of wants to tell him not to die, but if it came down to it, Jason probably wouldn’t have much of a choice.

Michael nods, slowly backing off. 

With one hand tightly holding the gun, he climbs up the thick tree trunk that expands for as long as they can see, rocks blocking the view to just where the tree starts or ends. He’s silent and agile, just like he was with getting out of the jeep, and Michael’s ashamed of himself when he realizes that he’s thinking about what a valuable asset Jason is.

He’s a person. He can’t start thinking like his parents.

Jason never properly gets up. As soon as he can see the other side, he rolls over so he can come down with as little noise as possible. From the side they’re standing, they hear nothing. And then nothing. And more nothing.

Geordie walks closer to Michael, tugs at his sweatshirt.

“Are you breathing?” she asks quietly.

Michael takes a deep breath, slow and trying to remain calm. He tries to small, answering in the same tone: “Sort of. Feel like the trees and rocks are watching you?”

“Yeah, but that’s just what it always feels like,” she says, slowly, like she’s still disoriented but finally going back to her own body. She somehow manages to bring her voice to an even lower tone, so much that Michael struggles to keep listening, has to sort of turn to the side so she’s closer to his good ear. “If you don’t feel the wind teasing you by imitating the voices of the dead, then you’re not in the right place.”

He looks at her, frowning.

“Dad used to say that,” she adds, as an afterthought.

But it does give him an idea.

Before he can put it into action, Jack asks: “What’s taking him so long?” in a hushed tone.

Before anyone can reply to Jack, someone knocks on the other side of the trunk. Jason’s voice comes steady but quiet as well: “Climb over, but come slowly. We have company.”

* * *

Sometimes, when Michael was four, he used to come back home and tell Karen in detail about his long afternoons playing with the other kids in the village. She’d listen, smile at his words, eventually shoot him approving glances depending on who he was hanging out with. He’d later forget all about it, save one thing:

“Just steer clear of humans. Don’t get involved.”

That was years before he even saw his first human. But she repeated it and repeated it, until he was agreeing with it too: “Okay. I won’t.”

* * *

Michael goes first, because Jack’s terrified but won’t admit it, and Geordie’s shoulder is slowing her down. He climbs over the trunk somewhat effortlessly, but the second he has eyes on what’s ahead, his balance is thrown and he nearly falls flat on his face. Jason doesn’t even seem to notice Michael’s struggle to get back on his feet, the wrap of his things under one of his arms, because he’s holding a child at gunpoint.

Perhaps to say that he’s holding the child at gunpoint would be an understatement. He’s got a chokehold on a girl that looks just a little older than Tati. Even in the darkness, her hair looks dirty and oily, a dark brown slicked back into a ponytail. Her eyes are more than alarmed: they’re angry. Jason’s got one arm around her neck, and the gun directly into her mouth, like she’s biting around it.

Michael stumbles back with widened eyes. 

“Jason,” he breathes out, blinking a couple of times. “She’s just a child. C’mon. Let her go.”

Jason doesn’t move, just keeps a strong hold on her, and his gun still inside her mouth.

Geordie comes next, and then, Jack. Michael doesn’t look away from Jason and the child, can’t possibly allow himself the distraction. He tries coming closer, his mind racing for something that could help him free the child and still not get them into trouble.

“Dammit,” Geordie hisses under her breath, coming closer to Michael, who’s still between Jason and the rest of them. 

Michael nods slowly. “Is this really necessary, Jason?” he asks, his voice small.

His heart is beating fast, like it does sometimes before heavy combat, only this time the threat is that he may have trusted a psychopath into his team, and now he’s about to shoot a child’s brains off. Michael presses his lips together, raising one hand as if to signal peace, and Jason glances only once at him, like he doesn’t understand.

“What?!” Jason asks, dumbfounded.

“Quiet. We don’t know how many more there are,” Geordie says, stepping front.

Jason stops just behind Michael, and asks: “Any idea what’s going on?”

Not really. But he doesn’t voice that.

He looks away from the girl and her angry eyes, and looks over. There’s light in the far distance, in what looks like a ruined tower. It isn’t electric, but maybe from fire, candle lights, something of the sort. There’s a metal worm fallen and broken between them and the only source of light, though, so the light is as dim as it gets, and no sight of more people alive are in sight.

“We’re just looking for our friends,” Michael tells the girl, trying to sound friendly.

Jason ignores him, and looks at Geordie. “I caught her trailing off from a group. They’re cutting the way through the rollercoaster,” he points at the metal worm that’s on the other side, that from here they can only seem the broken way up. “But as soon as they get to the car, they’ll know we’re not there. Not sure how much time we have. They had a truck.”

“A truck?!” Geordie snorts.

The girl’s big blue eyes are still trained on Michael. They seem to soften somehow, pleading, and Michael sinks his teeth to his bottom lip. “Jason, let the girl go.”

Jason looks up at him, as if he’s only really noticed Michael now.

“I don’t know about that,” Jack muses, “I think he must have a good reason to keep her that way, that little monster.”

Michael turns to him, outraged. “Little--?! This could be Tati!”

Jack narrows his eyes, looking hurt. Michael’s not sure whether it’s remembering Joel and Nicole had children that hurts him, or just the overall reminder that they exist somewhere away from him now. 

“Well, this isn’t,” Geordie says, stepping between the girl and Michael. “She’s a bounty hunter, and this is a lair. Whenever there’s a break-in, whoever gets the intruders gets the prize. The prize can go anywhere from money, to food, to protection.”

Feeling disgusted, he tilts his head sideways, staring at her. “And how do you know that?”

Goerdie sighs, but doesn’t break eye-contact. She brings one hand to her hurt shoulder, touching it very lightly, as if to remind herself to keep standing upward. “Because I used to live in one with my parents, before Death Valley. Because that was the only option for any humans in the South before Death Valley.”

Michael feels her words like a slap over his face. 

He turns to Jason, but Jason averts his gaze, the words clearly ringing true for him as well. 

Michael suddenly looks away from the girl, too, as if just looking could hurt him too.

“I didn’t… know,” he tries. 

This time, Geordie doesn’t try to educate him, and neither does Jason. She walks back to the girl, and though her tone is quiet, her voice is still firm and clear when she takes one of the rifles strapped around her chest, and brings the end of the gun to the forehead of the little girl. The girl doesn’t move, and Geordie touches the metal to the skin of the girl.

“I’m going to tell my friend to remove the revolver from your mouth, but if you try screaming, I’ll shoot you. If you try biting his arm, I’ll shoot you. If you do anything at all that we don’t ask you to do, I’ll shoot you so fast that you won’t even have a chance.” She pauses, and the angry blue eyes go to Geordie. “If we’re clear, blink.”

It takes a second, but the girl blinks.

Geordie nods to Jason, and without loosening the hold around the girl’s neck, he removes the gun from her mouth, and quickly puts it back on the waist of his pants, his free hand closing around the fists of the girl that were tied together behind her. He just shows that she’s tied to Geordie, and then Geordie’s nodding again, this time in acknowledgement.

It’s horrifying. All of this is.

Michael feels his bottom lip quiver, and try to stop it.

“It’s just the cold,” Jack says, cautiously.

Michael looks at him, and Jack offers what could only be described as something unique. It isn’t quite empathy and it isn’t quite understanding either. It isn’t anything that Michael can put a name to, but it helps cast away the desperation that something like what he’s experiencing is. He brings the wrap of his things to closer to his chest, both arms around it, and lets the thickening rain bring his hair to his face, not really minding having the view obstructed.

“Tell us why you weren’t in the truck,” Geordie commands.

There’s something different to her voice, like the grieving of her parents dying has only now caught up, and then her jeep, dying on her as well, and now her shoulder, making it look painful when she keeps the rifle up and with the barrel of the gun pressed against the little girl’s forehead. She sounds more serious and also ten years older, her hair combed back with her fingers, but falling again with the rain, even if she doesn’t even flinch, doesn’t even move at all.

The girl takes a deep breath, exasperated.

“I felt like walking.”

She sounds young, too, but not like Tati. She sounds broken, unlike many that Michael’s met in the past months, but still with something so heavy in her tone that it makes her stand out even among the suffering. It isn’t anything pretty to listen to, even with only one ear working.

Geordie puts the gun away for only a second, to charge it, and then brings it back to the girl’s forehead. In an instant, fear flashes greater than defiance, and she shuts her eyes, jumping in place and in Jason’s hold. When she realizes she hasn’t been shot, she must also realize that she hasn’t been shot _yet_. 

She presses her lips together, and Geordie tells her: “I’m waiting.”

The girl clears her throat a little awkwardly, and Michael thinks he can smell the fear of dying on her. The thought makes him frown, but he tries to brush it off.

“It’s normal procedure. The adults go on the cars because they can’t go places we can. We can hide and crawl and jump and sometimes they can’t.”

“So there’s more of you around,” Jason says, but his eyes are on Geordie again, each keeping the girl restrained from one side. Michael wonders what would happen if they had to deal with more than just one of her. Probably nothing good. “How many people are looking for us?”

The girl’s eyes fall on Michael again.

“I know who you are. You’re valuable.”

Michael feels something funny again, and he thinks it comes from the girl. Without really being able to say why, he can tell she’s human, a bounty hunter like Geordie had said. But the sense of defiance in her runs deep, like it was the only thing she was born to feel. It makes him uncomfortable, and though she’s restrained and just a child, he takes a step back anyway. He parts his lips, ready to say something, anything, and Jason tightens the hold of his arm around her throat, making her close her eyes and gasp.

“Wrong answer. I’ll be nice and let you try again.”

“Don’t you feel ashamed,” she says, raising her eyes to him, even though the angle doesn’t let him see her. “Bullying a poor little girl?”

“Maybe he does, but I certainly don’t,” Geordie says, forcing the barrel of the gun against her in a way that must hurt, because she winces quietly. Geordie’s voice comes stronger this time when she says: “I’ll count to five, and if you don’t answer how many people are out here looking for us, I’ll shoot your brains out. One, two, three--”

“I don’t know!” she begs, a little out of breath, looking at Geordie, struggling to keep her eyes open, or at least appearing that way. “I really don’t. We’re split in divisions, and I only know about mine. We only get invaders every couple of times a year, so when it happens every division is on their way to find them and get the protection of the Queen.”

“Great, more fake royalty,” Jack thinks out loud and, when Michael glares at him, Jason forces a smile. “You’ll get along great with them.”

Geordie looks over her shoulder at Michael, then back at the girl. Her eyes are narrowed and she’s trying not to let it show that she’s confused, but it isn’t working. “We never had Queens in any lairs. What changed here?”

“Everything,” the girl smiles, properly smiles, and not even the rain can erase the hint of sureness just big enough to be bordering maniac. “Everything changed when the Queen came to us. No more poverty. No more weakness. She’s changing everything, and you’re a fool to think you can stop it.”

Geordie shares a look of concern with Jason.

Michael steps closer to them, carefully, and looks at the girl until she’s looking back at him. “Who am I?”

She considers this for a second. Geordie calls his name to try and stop him, either from asking or from getting too close; maybe it is from getting answers. But he keeps on waiting for the girl to study him, and when she’s done, her smile is back.

“Less than I thought you’d be,” she says. Jason’s about to move to restrain her further, as if that’s needed, but Michael gives him one look, shaking his head, and Jason stops, even if he looks contrary to it. “You’re younger, but that’s only going to be better when they drain you from your blood so you can make us better.”

Her smile stays, firm and almost casual.

Michael frowns, taking a step back.

“She’s delusional,” Jason says, matter-of-factly.

“No, she isn’t,” Michael replies, slowly. “You said I’m valuable, but that has nothing to do with Chaos and its rising, has it? You don’t care.”

Jerking against Jason’s touch, she spits. It doesn’t land on Michael, but her contempt registers. Her voice is still carefully quiet, but it’s loaded with rage in a disturbing way when she says: “To hell with both Chaos and Order! When the Queen is done, there’ll only be us, and all you witches will bow!”

“Delusional, alright,” Jack says with a sigh, stopping next to Michael.

Michael can’t look away from her, but he forces himself to, Geordie’s slow movements with her sore shoulder making it obvious that she’s going to shoot the little girl. He restrains himself against yelling, but still runs to her and lowers the gun before Geordie can shoot.

Both Geordie and Michael go back a few steps, which leaves Jason alone with the girl. It’s fast, how she turns away from him and from his grasp, hands still tied together as she hooks her fingers around his hand with the revolver, pulling down so hard it’s a wonder that she doesn’t break his wrist. The gun falls, and she smirks up at him. Jason lunches forward, a fist raised to knock her out, but she’s smaller and faster than him, using his strength to her advantage. She ducks, and when he’s just about to regain his balance, her elbow connects to his back, making him fall. 

A lightning strikes the sky, the rain getting heavier and heavier.

One stupid action, and Geordie’s trying to aim at the girl with her whole left arm shaking and bleeding through the wrap of Jason’s sleeve, Michael by her side with nothing to help, and Jason getting up with startled eyes. The girl has Jason’s gun, and with one look, aiming at Jason first, Michael knows she’s going to shoot.

But she doesn’t.

The noise of the thunder never comes, and the lightning seems to expand and come their way. It moves down, faster and fiercer than anything Michael’s ever seen, the electricity hitting the young girl and making her whole body shake as she drops the gun and, eventually, falls.

Behind her, stands Jack, with his eyes rolled and fully petrol black, and his hands lowering, his fingertips still shimmering just lightly with electricity.

Michael looks at him with eyes widened, remembering what Luke had told him, months before, back in room 93, when Jack was just a name: lame magick, Luke had said. Electric manipulation.


	39. in poisoned places, we are anti-venom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO EXCITED TO POST THIS CHAPTER. *w* hope u guys enjoy it!!!~

They’re headed towards the towers in the midst of the fallen ones, just after the roller coaster. There are two ways of getting there: through the road, avoiding trees and rocks -- the easy way -- or through the thickness of said trees and rocks that go around the road -- the hard way. They’re more difficult to be spotted this way, but more likely to find other children and teenagers like the girl, and this time, Michael won’t try to save them. 

They move as fast as they can, Jason with the unconscious but still alive girl thrown over his shoulder, with both hands and feet tied, and a rag covering her mouth. Geordie is just behind him, one hand touching her shoulder at all times, like it’s getting worse, but she makes no comments of pain or wanting to slow down. Behind her is Jack, with one of the two rifles that was on Geordie, and the wrap that Michael had been carrying before. Jack, who had knocked the girl unconscious with a lightning, manipulating electricity from the sky as if that was easy. As if he hadn’t spent the past good few years of his life stuck underground and away from nature that gave him power. Jack who had saved them all.

That means Michael’s leading, eyes adjusted to the moonlight and the orange light of fire in the far distance, scraping his hands and knees with the unstable rocks and trees, climbing as he goes up and then lands back on the ground. There are holes the size of his hands in the knees of his jeans now, reddish with dried blood and dirt, but it’s funny how it doesn’t hurt anymore, not really. The side of his body where Jack had punched about a week ago only hurts if he rests his weight on his torso as he climbs over particularly tall trees. His jaw still aches, but mostly from how hard he’s been gritting his teeth ever since Geordie’s jeep started spinning. 

But there’s this something that makes the scar on his neck burn. It’s not quite pain as it is something that speaks to him, but like it’s in a different language. They’ve been all quiet for long enough that there’s nobody speaking, and yet. And yet, with one deaf ear, he can still hear something. 

The rain makes the ground muddy, and the mud makes them slower. It’s still some sort of blessing, because it covers their tracks and the lightnings are loud enough that even their gasps for breath couldn’t be heard even from a short distance.

But it’s tiring. It’s draining. And Michael wants to go on, desperately needs to, because he can easily convince himself that each step he takes towards the tower is another step he’s closer to Luke, and then it’ll all make sense. A woman calling herself Queen and wanting him dead doesn’t scare him, no matter how morbid her reasons -- either she’s the vapor woman herself, or she’s connected to her. But the matter of the fact is that she’s just another person wanting Michael gone. Running away from the city, first meeting the Vultures, he’d gotten a pretty strong sense that there’d be plenty of those. 

What scares him is not making it that far. What makes him terrified out of his mind is running out of breath and will power to make it. What will kill him isn’t the bounty hunter Queen, or the Order Council, but the rain.

He takes a deep breath, and lets his body fall over a rock he’s climbing. It hurts where his stomach meets the rock, but he needs a moment. His scraped palms touch ahead, but his head lolls to the side, mouth open and breathing hard, feeling the rain washing his face, his hair, his mouth. His legs are just barely supported by the odd position he’s in, but he hears talking behind him, proper talking this time.

Jason asks, “What’s wrong?”

Geordie sighs. “He’s tired.”

“We all are,” he responds, quieter, but still audible enough.

“We should stop for a while. Try to find someplace to hide from the rain.” Jack.

Silence goes for a few seconds. “We can’t go on the road,” Geordie reasons. “The only option would be the fallen roller coaster, but even then, there could be people there. We’d be sitting ducks. Plus you listened to that lunatic. She talked about draining Michael’s blood. How cool will it be if that’s exactly what’s happening to our people? We have to keep going.”

Jack snorts, loud and furious. “You think I don’t want my brother back? You think I don’t want to make sure Joel’s okay? But look at us! We’re damp! I can’t even lift my foot, it makes me exhausted. We need some rest.”

“Look, I think we should rest too, but it’s almost dawn. During the day it’ll be more difficult to not be spotted. This is not our home. We can’t move swiftly between these trees and rocks. They can.” Jason says.

“They already know we’re here,” Geordie tells them, her tone warningly.

Michael closes his eyes. Maybe if he just rests for a second or two.

“But they don’t know who we are, or what we’re here for. You took all the guns from the jeep. All they see is a dead car,” Jack stops, tone unnecessarily mocking then. “For all they know, it was an Order family wanting to go on a road trip to the border and losing their car in the process.”

With his eyes closed, something happens.

First Michael thinks it’s one of them, with their fingers wrapped around his ankles, pulling him very softly back down, so he’ll participate on the debate, give them his two cents. Then he realizes what’s licking at his ankles isn’t solid, something that ignores the heaviness of his mud-dirty sneakers and his damp jeans. With his eyes closed, it’s so much easier. With his eyes closed, he can let it come to him.

He never used to have to roll his eyes back for his Order magick to come, but then again, he spent such a long time away from nature, away from balance, focused so much on having at least some mild control over his Chaos, that he’d been neglecting his Order.

He blinks his eyes back, and sees the world different. Without turning, he can feel the four people behind him. The steady heartbeats of the girl, unconscious and unaware to their conversation. Jason’s tiredness, how heavily he’s carrying both the girl and the rest of the world; it’s a lot worse than he’s letting in, and Michael can feel that his eyelids beg to be closed. Geordie’s fear, so deep in her veins that it doesn’t carry in her voice -- fear that makes her clench her hand around her already sore shoulder, in need of rest just like the rest of them, only extremely self-conscious of how fragile their situation is. And then Jack. He can feel Jack’s irritation towards their resistance to just set camp on the roller coaster and be done for a few hours, can feel his defiance, the annoyance and the sleepy rage. But he can also feel something else. He can feel, when he looks back at Jack with the eyes of his soul, the pulsating energy that vibrates through him with every lightning that draws sharp lines in the dark sky. 

He can feel how hard it is to resist calling to the electricity with every single one of them.

He turns to them, blinking and rolling his eyes back.

“We need rest, at least a change of clothes and wait until the rain gets a bit better.” When he has their attention, he adds: “I can get us there safely.”

Michael tries smiling, but no one smiles back. He smirks, puts a lot of effort into propping himself up, and blinks his eyes away again. The world that he sees is full of void, but also full of energy. He can hear the soft wind of the trees, whispering secrets that he won’t ever have use for. He can feel the ground beneath him welcome the rain and the rain feast on it. But he can also feel the very strong presence of the living.

“There’s only us,” he tells them, without watching their faces, but feeling the wave of relief, surprise, and -- shockingly, from Jack -- amusement that radiate from them. “I’ll be able to tell if anyone approaches. We can take the shortest way to the roller coaster, find a place to sleep for a few hours there, just get some rest. Deal?”

Wordlessly, they all nod. And then they go back to walking.

* * *

It feels almost as if he could float away, not having the heaviness of the rain hitting his body repeatedly. He takes the goggles from his head, and it’s only when he studies it in his hands that he realizes just how bad they look, a mess of blood, dirt, mud. His face can’t look much better.

Nobody likes that their hideout is on the rollercoaster, but nobody complains, either.

What from the distance had made the thing look like an enormous metal worm, from up close makes it look like an endless melted stairway, two arms brought together by countless bars of metal, some broken, some intact. It goes around in the sky, creating a dangerous path that ends abruptly when the arms end, a fallen tree cutting its way. Green has made its way but very thinly, shy among all the brown and gray. It’s dull to look at, the rust and the mud and the abandonment of it. 

There are wagons, though. They seem to have been painted at some point, but it was so long ago that all the paint has worn off. They’re way smaller than the seats of Geordie’s jeep, but there are also many more. Over their heads there’s roof, just enough that Michael can picture it protecting children and adults from the sun as they first got settled into their seats, buckled up, and then it would go up.

Theirs wouldn’t, of course.

Michael’s sitting in the back one, still drenched and starting to feel the cold that hadn’t registered before with all the adrenaline. He sighs softly, eyes still focused on the goggle in his hands. It’s going to be okay, he tells himself. They’ll find Luke.

He squeezes the thing in his hands, shutting his eyes.

He hears a groan of discomfort, and turns, finding Geordie sitting on his side. Her hair is still very wet but her face isn’t; she’s got his blanket wrapped around her. It makes him feel just a tiny little bit jealous, then he remembers the blanket isn’t his any more than Luke is. Luke is hers too and everybody else’s that he’s captivated. The list goes on and on. 

He puts an arm around her, and though he’s wet and she isn’t, she doesn’t complain. She sighs and lets herself lean into him for comfort. Michael keeps the goggles on his free hand.

“How’s your shoulder?” 

“Peachy.”

Michael smiles.

Ahead of them, the unconscious girl lies on the floor of the wagon. She’s curled up and still unconscious, with her wrists and ankles tied up. She looks so small, so fragile, but this time Michael knows best than to feel sorry for her. 

Even if he can still feel guilty for the whole thing. Guilt is, after all, indiscriminating. He can manage to both be wary of her, and guilty that she’s being treated as a prisoner in her own home.

Jason’s changed into clean clothes as well; Michael’s, because he was the only one who brought any, apparently the only one who considered this could take more than the night, or that they’d make it for longer than that. As soon as they arrived there, as everyone just clinged to a dry space where they could rest, Jason got out of his clothes, back into the rain, washed himself as best as he could from the mud and the blood, and started going through Michael’s things without asking first. He didn’t touch the box with Opia.

Geordie made sure the girl was tied up well enough, giving Jack a brief look of interest as she did so, as if remembering how come she came to be unconscious. Jack caught her looking, asking why they had to bring her along. Geordie said she could be useful.

Michael didn’t ask how. 

Jack didn’t go back to the rain, just dried himself as much as he could and changed into clean clothes, turning away, as if he was embarrassed. The oldest of them. It made Michael chuckle.

Now Jason is making a stake from a branch, or sharpening his knife on it, or maybe both. Jack’s sitting by his side without really being next to him, and with a heavy sigh, he turns to look over his shoulder, at Michael and Geordie.

“Could you please just get in some dry clothes so we can start discussing sleep?” 

Michael raises his eyes at him. “You said please. I’m flattered.”

Jack flips him off, looking ahead again.

“You know,” Geordie starts, quiet and slow, “he does have a point. It won’t be long ‘til dawn, and with the sun comes the warmth. But it’s still cold. Not freezing like in the desert, but…” she shrugs. “How stupid will it be if you survive a village of ruthless bounty hunters that serve a crazy queen that wants your blood drained, only to die of pneumonia?”

Michael laughs at that, looking at her. 

Her dark blond hair is all brought to the side, far from clean, but drying up. Her eyes are big and a little red, either from sleep deprivation, or from crying. Michael’s going to assume she’s cried lots, with being orphaned at once, less than two weeks ago. It makes his stomach flip, just thinking about it. He couldn’t make himself function at all until there was hope Luke would be alive, and if he was completely honest with himself, as much as his feelings for Karen were complicated right now, he still found solace in her being safe. In Daryl being safe, too. There was that.

He presses his lips together, looking at Geordie.

She’d said she knew her parents wouldn’t be there. Said she was scared of what may be.

“How about this so-called-Queen?” 

Geordie sighs, looking away. Her voice changes when she speaks next. “Never saw bounty hunters answer to anyone. That’s just not what they do. They go after people to kill or to rescue and that’s what my kind does for survival. Not the ones in the desert, not here, those are not my people. Only Ilana could talk to them. Too ruthless.”

Michael cocks an eyebrow. “So this Queen can’t be a nice lady that will just willingly give us our friends back.”

She looks at him again, hesitating. “It’s been… it’s been almost two weeks. The girl mentioned taking your blood. The Queen may have done that to them already, Michael. We may be walking into their funerals.”

Michael frowns, looking away from her, and back at the rain that doesn’t seem to thin.

“Guess we’ll see.”

But he does what he should’ve done before, but didn’t have the strength to just stand up. He gets rid of the soaking wet clothes, gets some dry ones, washes his face and the cuts in his knees and arms and hands with the ruined sweatshirt. He wonders what the scar on his neck looks like, if he’s managed to clean it properly with the not very sanitary method of rubbing an already dirty shirt on his skin, but hopes for the best and asks no one about it.

When he hops back into the wagon, Jack’s fast asleep, curled to his side, with his face pressed against the metal of the back of his seat. It doesn’t look comfortable, but at least he’s resting. Michael can’t say the same for Jason and Geordie, both still alert, like they can’t help it.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Michael takes the goggles from the seat where he left them, and puts them back over his wet hair. “You two sleep, and I’ll watch out for any moves. Every few minutes I can roll my eyes back and see if there’s anyone coming. I’ll only be a few hours, then I wake you up and we keep moving.”

“So we’re moving in plain sunlight?” Jason cocks an eyebrow.

Geordie looks away. “What if this thing wakes?” she nudges the girl’s leg with her foot. “Can you handle it?”

Michael chooses to address Geordie’s question, because he doesn’t have a good enough answer for Jason’s doubts. “Yeah. I can handle her.”

* * *

The biggest hole in Michael’s plan is that he is, too, exhausted.

He wakes up with a start, beads of sweat collecting on his forehead, his whole body feeling heavy with the heat of the sun, and a gunshot. 

He tries to blink sleepiness away, trying to take in the situation as his hands grab for anything that he can hold onto, the sides of the wagon, anything. Geordie’s standing in front of him, with her gun still raised and the girl, with her arms freed, curling on the floor again, only this time she’s breathing hard and covering a fresh wound on the side of her stomach.

“I won’t miss next time,” Geordie says, evenly.

Jason and Jack both seem to have woken up with the gunshot as well, but they assess the situation faster than Michael. Jason sighs heavily and jumps over his wagon to theirs, pointing a gun to the girl’s head. Jack groans in annoyance, but stays where he is.

“I say she’s more trouble than she’s worth,” Jason tells Geordie, without looking away from the girl. “Let’s put a bullet in her head before she screams.” 

Michael stares up at them, the knots of his hands turning white with how hard he’s grabbing the outer sides of the wagon. The girl, on the floor and turned to Michael, looks at him. Her eyes are heavy with rage, and it seems to be directed at him.

He doesn’t understand. But he’d be a fool to stop either Geordie or Jason this time.

“What happened?” he asks, instead.

“Freed herself somehow. We overslept. It’s daytime, and I, for one, am annoyed to have lost my beauty sleep. That means we’ll play a game.” She presses her lips into a thin smile, and the girl narrows her eyes, but still doesn’t scream, both of her hands pressed to her wounded side. “We’re going to ask some questions, and to every thing you say that’s less than what we want to hear, I’ll shoot somewhere new.” 

Jason looks at Geordie with the corner of his eyes.

He doesn’t seem to be into this any more than Michael is.

“She’ll just lie,” Jack reasons, sighing heavily, his back to them. “It’s what I would do.”

The girl pushes herself to sit. She’s bleeding a lot, and her eyes are back on Michael.

“I’m going to die anyway. What stops me from screaming at the top of my lungs, so my divison finds you and gets the prize?” 

She sounds surprisingly put-together for someone who’s just been shot, but the child brokenness is still there, making her voice crack and her breath catch. And she is still looking at Michael, like she expects him to answer that, so he does. Trying to force his shoulders to relax, and letting go of the sides of the wagon, he sits up straight, looking back at her.

“I won’t let you die. I promise.”

The girl doesn’t look away from him, and neither does he from her.

He can’t see Jason and Geordie, but he does hear Jack turning, asking Jason: “What did he just say? Tell me I heard wrong. He lost half his ear but I’m the deaf one. I must be, because I thought I heard Michael being idiotic, but that can’t be right.”

Tilting her chin up, she studies Michael.

“You won’t let me die,” she repeats.

Michael nods.

She chuckles lowly. “That’s just rich. If it wasn’t for you assholes I wouldn’t be hurt in the first place,” she says. She looks away from Michael and back at the other two, but Geordie and Jason still have guns pointed at her, and Jack’s staring at her with contempt. She must realize that Michael’s word is the best she has going for her at the moment, because she looks back at him. “How exactly do you plan to save me, witch?”

“I won’t let them hurt you, for starters,” he gestures at Geordie and Jason. “They seem like your biggest threat right now. They’re a lot less friendly than me, as you may have noticed.”

She snorts. “You witches are all the same. Interchangeable scum.”

“Big words for a preschooler at gunpoint,” Jack mocks, cocking an eyebrow.

The girl narrows her eyes at him, but Michael stands up, stopping next to Geordie. “They’re not witches. Just him,” he points at Jack, “and me. But you knew about me already,” he trails off, but she doesn’t fill in the blanks. Michael sighs softly, looking at Geordie, watching her tighten the grip on her gun. He turns to the girl again. “Look, these two are human. They’re like you.”

“Maybe,” the girl looks at them, past their guns and at their faces. “But if so, they turned on their kind to run with Chaos. That makes them cowards.”

Geordie shoots the girl’s shoulder, and her body falls back with a thud, as she rolls to the side, screwing her eyes shut with the pain, teeth sinking on her bottom lip. Michael stares at Geordie, and she only shrugs, with a small smile on her lips.

“She’s a child,” he mouths.

Geordie rolls her eyes.

There’s a smile dancing on both Jason and Jack’s lips, so he supposes he’s alone on this one. He kneels down, closer to the girl, even though he can feel Geordie’s eyes heavily disapproving on him. His hand hovers over her shoulder, the one that isn’t pressed to the floor of the wagon, but he doesn’t dare touch her. He frowns, looking at her.

“Please, just tell us what you know. We aren’t here to attack you, your division, or anyone. We just want what’s been taken from us.”

The girl doesn’t look at him. Her eyes are still shut and she’s still choking on screams of the pain, but if she isn’t screaming, she must know that she should help them, or at the very least that she’ll be killed if she does. Michael’s hoping it’s not just the latter. 

“Uh, Michael? Have a word?” Jason asks.

Michael sighs, nodding and stepping away from her. He hops off the wagon, Jason following him. He hears Geordie saying, “Seems like it’s only gonna be you and me now. This should be fun. You talk and I shoot. You move and I shoot. Actually, you breathe loudly and I shoot.” Michael looks over his shoulder, a little worried, but Jason puts an arm over his shoulders to guide him a few feet away from the wagon.

Jack stays where he is, with his chin over his arm, watching Geordie and the girl like it’s TV. Michael supposes there wasn’t a lot of actual TV for him growing up. 

It’s long stopped raining, and the sun is so ruthless that it hardly looks like it rained at all. It’s hot, the type of hot that makes your skin feel like it’s too close to fire. He starts pulling the sweatshirt over his head, but Jason talks at the same time, and he doesn’t catch it, not with his bad ear turned to him.

When he’s done, he wraps the sweatshirt around his waist. His hand goes to his ear instinctively, tracing lightly over the cut tip, as he watches a very impatient Jason stare at him.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

Jason smirks. Not the usual charming and effortlessly flirty smirk, but a forced mean smirk. “Ah, no problem at all. I just asked you what the fuck do you think you’re doing.”

It’s still too hot. Michael feels a bit dizzy.

“Look, do you trust me?”

“Do not ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

Michael stares at him. Jason stares back.

With a sigh, Jason shakes his head and looks away. “I get it, alright? Shielded Order boy, son of a Councilwoman, shielded Chaos boy, prince of a city meant to be long dead. I get it. Either way you look at it, you haven’t seen what people are capable of at their worst.” He pauses, but when he sees that Michael may interrupt him, he goes on, voice quieter but somehow firmer. “I’m not blaming you for having an easier life than many of us. But you have. You look at that person there and you see a little girl. I look at her and I see a survivor. Ugly and rotten to the core, capable of doing anything to keep alive. I know, because that’s my kind -- not because she’s human like me, but because she’s angry at the world like me.” 

Michael wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, squints his eyes to look at Jason because he’s standing with his back to the sun.

“It was my mother who sent the terrorist to Death Valley. Mom is responsible for the deaths of many, including my friends, your grandfather, and very possibly my boyfriend too. She was sending a message, really, because she thinks I’m Daryl’s prisoner. All of that death, just to prove a point; that he shouldn’t mess with her. That I belong to her.” It’s his turn to pause. Jason blinks a couple of times, confused, and then takes a step back, as if something in Michael could be contagious. Michael smiles grimly. “You’re right, Jason. I was shielded from the horrors of pretty much everything for most of my life. I had the privilege of ignorance because I wasn’t the target. But I have seen people at their worst. The past few months have been all about being proven that the people I love are capable of things I wish would never cross their minds.”

Jason keeps looking at him. 

Michael sighs heavily, readjusting the goggles on top of his head so the leather doesn’t touch his ear directly. Everything is too hot.

“You should take off the coat. You look like you’re frying.”

He walks past him, hops into the wagon again. He sits on the floor next to the girl, that’s since pulled herself to sit again, but looks pale, nauseous, and is still bleeding a lot.

“Hey, Jack, make yourself useful. Get that sweatshirt of Jason that he ripped a piece of the sleeve for Geordie’s shoulder. Also, some food and water.”

Jack frowns, getting up from his seat on the next wagon, but looking at Geordie for answers.

“What for?” she asks, frowning.

Jason joins them again, and this time, he doesn’t aim his gun at anyone. He doesn’t even make eye-contact with anyone.

Michael tilts his head to the side, until he’s on eye-level with the human girl. 

Pain and confusion seem to have taken the room that anger had.

“What’s your name?” he asks quietly.

“Neena.”

Michael nods, then looks at Geordie again. “For Neena, of course.”


	40. tonight the foxes hunt the hounds

Jason warned Michael that it would be hot during the day, but it isn’t just that it’s hot. It’s torturous. No breeze to give them any relief. Just the heavy warmness, even under the roof that guards the wagons of the roller coaster, in the shadows, or what could pass for that in that part of the country anyway. In no time, Neena downed almost an entire bottle of water. Michael was positive that Geordie was very close to shooting him for allowing such a thing, for inviting it to happen.

After she drank almost all of that bottle in one go, she ate. It wasn’t good food, mostly because good food never made it to Death Valley, but it was decent rations, bars that could keep them going for at least a few more days. She ate twice, while Michael wrapped the ripped sweatshirt around her waist tight, her small figure allowing for a decent enough bandage.

Jack grew bored of that fast, and Jason just didn’t seem to want to watch. Probably just a few wagons ahead, but not with Michael right now. Now, it’s just Michael, Neena, and Geordie. Geordie never dared looked away from them, let alone leave them alone.

Michael doesn’t have to ask what’s on her mind. Her incredulous look speaks for itself.

“Done,” Michael says, still sitting beside her on the floor of the wagon. 

He’s soaking in his T-shirt and jeans, his feet especially hot in the boots that are his only footwear, still muddy from last night. The back of his head is damp, and he has to remind himself to breathe calmly, so his chest doesn’t get tired. He’s sweating all over.

Neena’s on her clothes from yesterday, a long sleeved shirt and pants, both in the color black. They have holes and the color is worn out enough to be almost gray, but she doesn’t look to be having as much of a hard time with the weather as Michael is. Geordie doesn’t seem to be, either, now sitting but still watching them closely, fingers of her good arm wrapped tightly around her gun. 

Michael breathes out heavily through his mouth, looking ahead. The roof of the beginning of the roller coaster protects them from the sun, but around the black old metal he can see the fierce sunlight. It should be a hopeful sight, but it only makes him think that this is what hell must be like.

He hooks his fingers on the collar of his shirt behind his head, and starts to pull.

Neena snorts. “Bad sunburn.”

Michael stops, then, and looks at her. He tests a smile; it feels fake on his lips, but the effort must show, because the look of starvation and physical weakness that had taken over from anger don’t go back to that. She just studies him carefully, like she’s making up her mind, taking into account all that has happened in the past ten hours or so. She’s been shocked, abducted, and shot. But none of that was Michael’s doing. Michael’s doing was to guarantee that she doesn’t die, and to feed her, and to give her water, and to look after her wounds.

At least that’s where Michael hopes her mind goes.

The girl that looks around ten or eleven studies him for another minute, and then looks away, hands going to her sides. Michael wants to know whether the bullets are still inside or if they scrapped her, but the only person he thinks would know is Geordie, and she still looks too angry to be approached, so he keeps on ignoring her presence.

“Neena,” Michael says, slow and careful, and the girl seems to grow rigid next to him, staring down. “Do you have a family?”

She grits her teeth, and for a second Michael thinks she’ll try and spit on him, and on them, again. But she doesn’t. She takes a deep breath to regain her composure, and then shakes her head no. Michael nods slowly, looking at Geordie, but he sees no empathy in her eyes.

He’s about to ask the next question when Neena says: “Your Dad killed them.”

Michael frowns, looking at her again. “I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know. There’s a lot I still don’t.”

She meets his eyes, but they’re blank. “You’re not sorry. You never met them. You don’t know the circumstances,” she cocks an eyebrow, challengingly. Michael doesn’t correct her, because she’s right. Neena sighs, looking away again, both hands over her stomach. “Order put a big prize on Daryl Clifford’s head. Most of the divisions sent people after him, tried to find him in the desert, wherever they could. Mom and Dad were just another pair of losers that didn’t get what they were out there to get.”

For the first time since the three of them were alone, Geordie speaks.

“I hope you don’t expect sympathy for your folks trying to get his father killed and dying in the process.” Michael looks at her, and so does Neena. Geordie’s in pain; must be with how her shoulder’s since gone up in tension, the bandage firm but the wound likely to be deeper than he thought. It occurs to him for the first time that maybe her shoulder is dislocated. “That’s on them. Bounty hunters know the risks of accepting jobs.” She says the words _bounty hunters_ like they’re meant to sting, and maybe they do.

Neena stares back at Geordie as if they’re equals.

“Because being an assassin is so much more honorable.”

Geordie smiles a very small smile. “It is. We make pacts of peace with people that will take us in and treat us well. Here you’re treated like garbage. That’s why your family is dead,” she adds the last sentence with raised eyebrows, making of Neena’s parents a cautionary tale. Neena narrows her eyes, but Geordie isn’t done yet. “Where I come from, we look after each other. We may be trained early. Girls have blood in their hands before they have their periods,” she snorts, entertaining herself for a second, and then sighs. “But we do have each other’s backs. We don’t betray each other. We stick around.”

Neena tilts her head ot the side. “Is that why you’re a dying breed?” 

Geordie tightens the grip on her arm, and Michael finally interferes, reaching to touch her knee, even if it leaves his back vulnerable to a possible attack from Neena. “Geor,” he says, quietly, and something changes in her eyes. Michael frowns, looking at her, hoping he can communicate more than her name. 

The stab doesn’t come. Neena does nothing. 

So he lets go of Geordie and looks at her again.

“How do you know about that, Neena? About the deaths of humans on Death Valley?”

Neena lifts her shoulders. 

Geordie grits her teeth, but Michael doesn’t give her room to talk this time. “Neena,” he repeats, pleadingly, and when she looks at him, he asks: “Can you tell us about your Queen? We don’t mean to harm her. Hell, we don’t even want to _meet_ her. But I think I may have already met her. I think I know her, and I just need to make sure I’m wrong,” he pauses, and having her full attention, adds: “You said something about draining my blood, making you better… Can you tell us about that?”

She lifts her chin up, staring at him. 

“What? Because you didn’t let me die for two seconds you think I’ll crack?”

“I’m making good on my promise,” he says. “In return I just need you to help me find my friends.”

Neena seems to fight back a smirk, raising her eyebrows. “And how are any of your questions about your friends, Witch Prince?”

It’s his turn to grit his teeth, tell himself that he ought to control his breath if he isn’t to ruin everything. “I think you know.” He pauses, then: “I need you to tell me I’m wrong.” 

Neena lifts her shoulders nonchalantly.

“Think you can find your friends there,” she points at the fallen tower, closer to them now than it was yesterday when Michael first took notice of it; the only light in the dark during the storm. “You better hurry.”

Michael can’t tell if the last part is meant as mockery or as a real advice.

Geordie sighs heavily, and for a second she looks exhausted, in so much pain that she may fall down. But she doesn’t; it’s only a flash of weakness and then she’s looking at Michael again. “It’s really hot. We should wait until the sun is gone. It’ll be only starting to get cold, so maybe we can have an hour or two of good weather and attack.”

Michael considers this, then breathes out too, dropping his head back so he’s staring at the ceiling of the wagon, elbows resting on his knees. “Maybe we should go now.”

Neena turns to him, raising her eyebrows. “Who did the Queen take from you?”

Her tone isn’t controlled and calculating. She sounds like a curious child, asking why the sky’s blue. Because she loves her Queen and her promises and doesn’t seem to care in the slightest about what’s going on in that tower. What is most likely happening, anyway.

“My boyfriend,” he says, and then pauses. It doesn’t feel like the entire truth, so he corrects himself: “My people.” 

“Maybe just their corpses,” Geordie snorts.

“Even then. We’ll give them proper funerals, if that’s the case,” Michael tells her, but it’s pure bravado. If Geordie’s right, this will all have been for nothing. Death is death one way or another, and what happens next isn’t up to him to think about until it’s something distant. 

Neena sighs softly, and tries to pull herself up to sit properly, so it doesn’t hurt. She seems to have relaxed, and watching her with the corner of his eye, he waits and waits until she speaks again.

“The Queen isn’t bad like you think she is. She’s saving us.” 

Geordie mocks: “I bet.”

But Neena, no doubt, believes it.

Something changes, then. Something that starts at the base of his spine, like a needle poking him. He takes the deepest breath he can, closing his eyes, and he can feel the very weak wind speaking to him in a tongue of no words, whispering in his good ear, just caressing his bad one. He feels the shiver that cuts through his throat like a warning, so he rolls his eyes back, and opens his eyes.

Before he can even identify the world around him, he can feel Neena’s terror of his eyes and his being, cringing and wincing as she abruptly tries to move away, too fast for her injured little body, and she falls back on the wagon, hands going to her wounds, but horror still present in her face.

Geordie’s worry raises as her body tenses. Michael hears her heartbeat telling him all that she isn’t, about the pain in her muscles and the exhaustion in her bones.

Wagons ahead, Jack and Jason are sitting opposite to each other. Michael can’t see them as they are physically, but the vibrant energy around them. Jason’s wary, always wary, and Jack’s annoyed at something, probably Jason.

But there’s more than that. He stands up slowly, breathing in and out steadily, eyes widened to catch any movement behind the rocks and the ruined asphalt, all the dead debris that with his eyes rolled back looks beautiful. It’s a black and white movie and people are the splashes of color that were never supposed to be there.

He can’t see them yet, not even with his eyes rolled back, but the faint wind raises the hairs in the back of his neck. The trees, fallen and dry and dead, with just enough energy in them that Michael can see them, seem to know of his magick, that at least part of him is Order and cooperates with nature. Doesn’t use it to bend it and manipulate it, but creates and follows it along.

At least half of him.

He blinks, and when his eyes open again, they’re green.

“Humans coming. Maybe three or four? I don’t know. They’re not running, but they’re coming. We have to move.”

Georgie presses her lips together, and murmurs: “Fuck.” 

It’s the first time she doesn’t care about Neena enough to keep her gun aimed at her; she moves so she’s closer to the next wagon, and calls the other two, lets them know there are humans coming. It gives Michael the few seconds he needs to look at Neena and see the terror dissipating for something else. Michael can’t read her expression, but she watches a shift: whatever it is that she saw, from Michael’s eyes turning into galaxies to what he told Geordie, something changes, something that wasn’t there before taking shape, until she reluctantly pulls herself up until she’s standing. One of her wounds, on her shoulder, seems to have long stopped bleeding, but the one on the side of her stomach makes her wince when she stands.

She’s looking at Michael. She tilts her chin up.

“You won’t have to outrun them if you can hide.”

Michael tries to steady his breathing. The weather is too much for him, makes his brain go slow. 

He frowns at her, and then Geordie’s looking too, and soon Jack and Jason. Jason and Geordie both fall silent when they hear her, but Jack, still in the next wagon, just cocks an eyebrow. “Well, what are we waiting for, then? It’s definitely too hot to run.”

Jason glares at him, and Michael’s grateful for that, so he doesn’t have to.

“Neena, what are you talking about?” he asks instead.

She takes a deep breath, pressing both of her hands to her stomach, and the improvised bandage pressing around it. “The sewers. Nobody’s used them since the amusement park went out of order, but my division does, sometimes. I know where they lead.”

“Sure,” Geordie smiles grimly, “we’re absolutely going to get underground with the bounty hunter.”

“Underground won’t be so hot. I don’t know about you, but I’m dying here,” Jack says. 

He means it as an exaggeration, tone of voice heavy with mockery, but he’s sweating a lot, shirt glued to his chest and hair soaking. The abrupt temperatures may have given him a bit of a cold; he certainly looks feverish. He catches Michael staring, and frowns, as if to say: _What?!_

Jason shakes his head. “No, I don’t buy it. If your division uses it, what’s stopping them from getting us there?”

Neena screws her eyes shut for a moment, lowering her head and sneaking a peek at her wound. She removes her hand from over the bandage, and it comes back slick. She’s still bleeding, even if less. Michael looks at Geordie to try to get some type of guidance, but it’s useless. She’s looking over her shoulder, worried about a more numbered threat.

“There aren’t many of us left,” she says, her eyes hard, like Jason’s somehow to blame, being a human and siding with Death Valley. Then, more evenly, she adds: “We’re thirteen. Ten went out to find you before the other divisions do. They’ll never think you’re in the sewers. Never.”

“Supposing we believe you--” Jason starts.

Jack cuts him off, sighing heavily and saying: “Please let’s believe her and then find someplace that isn’t boiling hot.”

“Supposing we believe you,” Jason starts over, without looking away from her, “ten plus you is eleven. How about the other two?”

“Working,” she lifts her shoulders, then closes her eyes with a wince, remembering the gun wound. She snorts, as if she thinks it’s actually funny that she may have forgotten, then adds: “My division probably thinks I’m working too.” 

Michael tilts his head to the side. “Define working.”

Jack drops his head back and makes an annoyed sound of impatience.

Neena rolls her eyes. “Looking for food and shit to steal in the desert. Scavenging. Who are you to judge?”

He brings his hands up. “No judging. Swear.”

She rolls her eyes again, sighing. “Make up your minds. They’re coming.”

Michael looks at the rest of them, his mind already made. 

Geordie presses her lips together, looking at Jason, and Jason looks back at her. There’s communication that passes between them that Michael doesn’t catch. He wonders what it used to be like, when their friend Diana was still part of their link. The three assassins of Death Valley, human but more skilled than most of their witches, getting almost equal treatment as the Champions, now as gone as them. Especially being so closed to the daughter of their leader, Ilana, it must’ve felt like their own type of royalty.

Only none of them were really kings and queens, princes and princesses.

They were all just desperately trying to stay alive.

“I don’t think it’s wise,” Geordie says, looking back at Michael. “We may not have a choice, though. That one over there,” she points at Jack with her gun, “is sweating a lot.”

“Fuck you,” Jack says, with a frown.

“We’re all sweating. It’s hot,” Michael tells her.

Jason shakes his head. “Not like this. He spent literal years locked in that lab, and then he went to a fucking desert. His body is not used to any of this, and--”

“What do you know about _my_ body?!”

“--and as much as I hate the idea of letting the bounty hunter lead the way, I’m not sure if Jack can take this. You didn’t go through all the trouble of getting him out just to tell Luke he died twenty minutes away from him, did you?”

Jack’s staring at Jason with the most offended expression. “What the actual fuck.”

Michael nods curtly in understatement, and only glances Geordie’s way before he’s turned to Neena. “Can we get to that tower through the sewers?” 

Without hesitance, she nods. “It connects all the park. It’s just knowing where to turn.”

“This is a mistake,” Geordie murmurs, looking away, like she can’t bear to watch. But it’s still a quiet comment, more to herself than to any of the rest of them. Michael chooses to ignore it.

“Alright, Neena. We need your help,” he says.

* * *

There’s an entry close to where they are, under a pile of junk. Michael, Jason and Geordie lift it together and Jack finds the dull metal lid. Neena doesn’t help, doesn’t offer any word of either encouragement or hurry. She just stays there, hands pressed carefully around herself and the wound close to her waist. By the time they’re all pulling the lid out, Jack burns his hands and curses under his breath, nearly losing balance. Michael doesn’t comment on it, but he looks even more feverish. 

Michael’s not feeling so good himself. The intense sun is taking its toll on him as well; he has difficulty breathing, his damp shirt gluing to his chest and back, and as he looks down to push the lid away with the rest of them, he feels the beads of sweat collecting on his forehead, dripping down his chin into his shirt. 

Weather like this makes people lethargic, like taking any step is against their nature.

With the lid out though, it’s too dark to see much of what’s waiting for them. There’s a solid second of tension as they all have their second thoughts, but then Michael hears it, his Order magick calling to him, urging him to move.

It’s the first Neena speaks in at least twenty minutes. She cocks her eyebrows, looking directly at him. “They’re coming closer, aren’t they?”

Michael presses his lips together, looking around. Jason’s got his palms on his knees, and is breathing heavily. Geordie’s got her rifle strapped around her chest, her hair pulled in a messy bun. Jack’s sitting on his legs, palms turned up on his thighs, like he’s still thinking about getting burned by hot pavement.

“I’ll go first,” Michael offers.

“No shit,” Jack says, tilting his chin up. “Little Miss Sunshine goes first, so if it’s a trap and the sewers are full of big ass rats or something, they’ll eat her and not us.”

Neena parts her lips, looking offended.

Geordie shakes her head. “No, Michael’s got a point. If she goes first, she can run.”

“I did not say that,” Michael turns to Neena, eyebrows raised apologetically. 

“Because I can run like this,” Neena takes her hand off her bandage, showing the slick of blood. Geordie doesn’t bat an eyelash at that. Neena adds: “Thanks to you.”

“That’s settled, then,” Jason forces a tired smile. “The bounty hunter goes first.”

Neena rolls her eyes, but moves closer to the sewer entrance. Before she jumps in, Michael tells Jason to treat her by name, but he’s mostly ignored. She disappears in the darkness, a wet splashing sound coming from there. They don’t arrange much after that, only that Geordie will be last, so she can try to land on Jason’s shoulders and close the lid, just in case the people searching for them end up where they were.

Michael goes right after Neena.

He takes a deep breath, staring at the darkness, and the darkness stares back.

“What the hell are you waiting for, witch prince?” the darkness asks.

He has to remember why he’s there, who he’s there for. He’s there for the people who were taken away from them because of him. Maybe Karen isn’t directly to blame about their extraction -- though _someone_ certainly had to be -- but she the one sending a terrorist into Daryl’s city. It was because he never contacted her after that day months ago when Luke burned a hole in his cell door, and took away the chains. 

Michael’s there for the boy he loves. But also out of guilt, which as bad as it is, can be a powerful motivator. 

He jumps in.

His feet land on water, not more than an inch or two of it, but it splashes up to his knees. He knows this is still water that has to have been here for solid years, definitely dirty, the smell of rusting metal contributing to the sureness that it can’t be good. But the momentary relief that it gives him, being in an enclosed space with so much water, more than gives him willingness to keep going. He takes a deep breath of that disgusting smell, and though his stomach growls in hunger, he starts feeling better immediately.

But he can’t see much at all. In the next seconds that it takes for Jack to come down, his eyes adjust a bit to the darkness, but all he can make is the vague silhouette of Neena, and even then, he could be imagining most of it. Behind them and ahead just lies more darkness. He’s not sure where walls paths begin and walls end.

“Shit,” Jack curses, “I can’t see shit.”

Michael finds his arm, and when Jack jerks away, he says: “Relax. It’s me. Your eyes will adjust.”

Jack sighs heavily, but he doesn’t sound as panicked. Jason comes down next, and then Geordie, ending the only source of light they had. Michael’s stomach growls again, and he starts feeling like an idiot for having left behind all their ration, clothes, plus the box with adrenaline and Opia.

“I forgot,” he starts, but Jason interrupts him.

“Jack has it.”

Without asking, Michael goes for Jack’s hands, trying to find the sheet wrap, his frown only deepening as Jack slaps his hands away but Michael finds nothing.

“I made a backpack, sort of,” he says, “just made a rope of what was left of Jason’s sweatshirt and then wrapped the thing around them. It’s easier to carry.”

He sounds almost modest. Michael blinks a couple of times, managing to make the shape of Jack’s body closer to what he supposes is a wall. “I had forgotten you make things.”

Jack snorts.

Geordie sighs, asking lowly: “Has the girl already run away?”

“Right here,” she says, but she sounds a few feet away. “Find the walls, and then just follow me.”

Michael rolls his eyes back, and though it helps nothing with the dark tunnels, he can see each of them clearly, or at least the energy coming from their bodies. He takes a deep breath, feeling a wave of relief that somehow, they’re all still there.

“How long ‘til that tower?” Jason asks, the first to move after Neena.

“About half hour if you stop chatting and start walking.”

Michael watches Geordie touch her rifle and then let go. 

And then, they’re all moving.

Rhetorically so, Michael says into the darkness: “Let’s go then.”


	41. you just might see a ghost tonight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SO EXCITED FOR YOU TO READ THIS FJSDKLFSHGLKSJ

The sewers are endless, but at least Michael can breathe.

His steps make him tired, the soles of his boots heavy with water, but the walls are cool to the touch and it doesn’t feel like air is toxic hot against his skin anymore. It feels almost good; could maybe feel that way if it wasn’t for the thoughts that won’t leave him alone about just what they’re running towards. He hopes something that justifies the hope that’s brought them this far.

He only rolls his eyes back to green when he can hear Jack’s heartbeat going back to normal. It was unnaturally fast when they all went down, and he must have a fever, but even his body temperature seems to normalize as they keep walking. Of course he doesn’t ask Jack how he feels -- he doesn’t want to alarm him -- but he’s convinced that however it was that he was feeling, it’s better now.

Jason’s still the more alert among them, and Geordie’s mostly forgotten about her injured shoulder. It can’t hurt as much as the gun wounds that Neena carries, at least.

Neena is silent for most of the way, pausing very briefly once or twice, but mostly she keeps to herself. They all do in different ways, all too busy with their thoughts and worries to verbalize any of them. 

With one hand flat against the humid sewer wall, they keep marching towards the tower that will hopefully offer some answers. Neena keeps walking until her walking turns to limping, and even then she doesn’t stop, and neither do any of them, even if Michael wants to ask her if she’s alright to keep going.

He knows she needs to keep going even if she’s not alright.

It’s just really, really hard to disassociate her from Tati, even if they’re as different as two little girls can be. They’re worlds apart, and not only because of how they look physically, because of the magick that runs through the veins of one and not the other. It’s the malice for survival that Tati never had in her eyes, or at least not until the explosion. Michael’s not eager to see if anything’s changed in her after that.

He sighs; asks: “How long?”

Neena’s voice comes out more full of cracks and pauses than he’d expected. “Not long.”

But he still asks nothing, and they all still keep moving.

His eyes grow used to the darkness but only to an extent. He can’t make more the very vague shapes, but he knows to expect turns, can feel marks on the wall under his calloused hand. Neena’s division must’ve marked the walls so they know where they are, but the markings still don’t make much sense to Michael. Sometimes they’re circular shapes, others they’re lines, different numbers of them each time. Sometimes both.

He presses the pads of his fingers against them as if he could possibly memorize them for later -- which he can’t, his memory’s not that good --, because it’s the only thing he can do to busy himself. It’s what stops his mind from jumping ahead and making him stop. He wonders what is it for the others, and has a couple of guesses. 

Without being able to see any of them, he thinks Jack’s got the knuckles of his hands white with how tightly he’s holding onto the ropes that make for straps, thinking of the Opia and the adrenaline that they have and it’s still a secret to Michael and him only. Michael bets he’s thinking of when to use them. As for Geordie, Michael would bet she’s focusing on her shoulder so she doesn’t let herself feel pain. At this point, Michael’s almost positive she’s dislocated her shoulder, and while he’s not very familiar with how assassins for pay deal with injuries, he’s pretty sure she’s got a mantra going on, telling herself she’s strong, that she doesn’t feel pain, that she’s more than Neena and her people because she made it out, and she won’t ruin it. Something along the lines.

Jason, though, he doesn’t know. He can’t think of what could be on his mind right now, and the thought makes him uneasy, like not being able to read someone on his team well could be a liability. The second he realizes he’s thinking about liabilities, he wonders about Neena, too, but before he can elaborate on that, a different shape comes under his fingertips.

It’s a triangle.

He holds his breath, stopping, and predictably enough, Neena sighs heavily and says, “Well, this is it,” and then, when they all stop as well: “You have to go up. There’s a metal ladder that comes down if you reach the entrance, but I can’t climb with my stomach still bleeding.”

“It’s not your stomach,” Geordie corrects her, just to have something to say.

“I’ll climb it,” Jason offers, “just need a hand. Michael?” 

In the dark, they find themselves better than Michael could’ve predicted. Maybe it’s just that their eyes adjusted to the lack of light better, but it’s like each of them know exactly where the other is. Michael helps Jason up, and though Jason’s heavy, it doesn’t take more than a few seconds for Jason to grab the ladder and for Michael to let him go, so he brings it down as he lands back on the still water.

They climb in tense silence, looking over their shoulders and feeling the shivers of anticipation of leaving a rather cool place for the boiling hot that outside will welcome them to. Geordie has the rifles, and Jason probably at least his revolver, but neither Jack nor Michael are carrying any weapons.

The thought that Neena could just make a run for one of their guns and kill all of them makes him hold his breath, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck. But then again, none of them would be of much use to her if they’re dead. There’d be no prize to claim either way.

That is not happening. If Neena’s to betray them, she needs them alive.

And they need her guidance, too. Obviously. But she’s just about to outlive her usefulness, and Michael can only hope she doesn’t panic; that she trusts that Michael won’t let the others harm her, even if they want to, even if they think that’s the reasonable thing to do.

Michael’s the second to leave the sewers, right after Jason, and the first thing he notices is, predictably enough, the warmth. The air is sultry and heavy, like it can creep under your skin and boil what’s underneath. The second Michael’s feet land on the ground, it’s as if even the earth mocks him and tries to burn his boots. 

The second thing he realizes is how much it smelled down in the sewers, now that they’re outside again. In the middle of dry fallen trunks and rocks as big as the ones they encountered when they were finding their way off road to the roller coaster, right beside an enormous tower that looks as if its top floors were crushed down by something else, it still somehow manages to smell to nature.

Michael takes a deep, deep breath of that, and stares at the tower.

It goes up for maybe six or seven meters, three floors and a fourth interrupted, cut abruptly and with a fragile-looking rooftop covering the top. Instead of bricks it’s made of rocks, or at least that’s what it looks like on the outside. Michael takes a few more steps towards it, still far away enough that even if someone was watching out the window, they probably wouldn’t notice him.

Most of the windows are both broken and blocked. In some it looks like someone may have moved furniture to cover the entrance, and in others it’s just big black rags.

His fingertips tingle with the anxiety, and he closes his eyes, opening them again to see the world differently. He can still feel people behind him, Neena struggling to get out of the sewers without anybody’s help, but she’s not interesting to him right now.

Right now, it’s just the tower that he cares for. He can’t differentiate where one person starts and the other ends -- that happens when there are too many of them. At least ten, but probably more. Michael can’t see straight; their vibrating blue molecules get mixed up unless he’s closer. As he spreads his fingers and tries to feel for energy, what he feels is overwhelming enough to send him down on his knees, fingers pressed to his temples and a grunt leaving his mouth.

It’s too much. Too many people feeling too much.

It’s not only pain, but that’s mostly it.

With both his knees planted on the ground and sitting on his legs, he opens his eyes again, green and confused, looking as Geordie touches his shoulder with a frown on her face.

“You okay?” she asks.

Michael doesn’t answer. It doesn’t matter.

“We have to go,” he says, instead.

Jack and Jason don’t argue with that, and neither does Neena. In fact, Neena seems to have saved some energy for this; she’s walking in more purposeful steps, even if she winces in every single one of them. 

Something tastes bad in his mouth. It’s the metallic taste of blood, only it isn’t his. It’s getting harder and harder to tell his Order magick to his Chaos one. He’s tried to connect with the people inside the tower and their pain shoots up his spine. It makes him stand up straight and shake the thought and the connection away. It leaves fast enough, but he still tastes that something odd in his tongue as he takes tentative steps in the direction of the others.

Jason’s staring ahead, and Michael can almost hear the engines in his head turning fast as he makes a plan or two, and he thinks that maybe, had they been introduced in different circumstances, they wouldn’t get along at all. Jason’s smarter than he is, smart like Calum, a strategist at heart and just as bright. 

Michael wonders how he’s doing lately. 

But the thought doesn’t stick. He knows that anything he comes up with in his head is to distract him from what’s about to happen, whatever that is. How close to Luke and to others he must be; he feels the anticipation in his bones. 

His hand goes to his eyebrow, the one that was once pierced with the eyebrow melted for Jack to find the location to where Luke’s tracker ended up. Luke had made that piercing for him the day they first kissed, just a minute or two before it happened. 

“Two men,” Jason says, past them and ahead of the group, head peeking out of the bigger dried trunk that blocks their path. “Okay, going in will be easy. It’s going out that we should worry about.”

Geordie nods to him, their body language speaking but Michael doesn’t speak their shared language. They must agree on something, curt nods and looks that go beyond them and back to the rest of the group. It’s subtle enough that Michael only catches because he’s staring, but Jack’s sighing and wiping sweat off his forehead already, and Neena glaring at him, maybe remembering what it’s like to be struck by lightning.

“Can you handle her if she tries anything cute?” Geordie asks Michael, grabbing her rifle and pointing at Neena. Neena starts to speak, eyes narrowed and hands still pressed to her side, but Michael nods quietly, and Geordie cuts her off before she starts. “Good. Jason and I will take them and then come back for you. Be quiet, though. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

Michael nods a second time, and watches as they prepare to leave.

They’re still talking to each other, only their mouths don’t move. Michael can’t tell whether they flow so well together because they were two of the only three assassins in Death Valley for the most part of their lives, or if it’s because they’re humans. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

He looks up, at the sun burning what’s visible of his skin and making him soak through his clothes. It’s possibly worse than it was before they went down into the sewers, and while Neena sighs heavily and keeps her eyes on the trunk where she last saw Jason and Geordie, Michael walks closer to Jack. 

“How are you doing?” Michael asks, his voice quiet and a frown on his face.

Jack’s lips are parted and he seems to gasp for air as smoothly as he can. “Splendid.”

Michael stares at him, then shakes his head.

He would feel his forehead for a fever, but he’s not entirely sure he could, and Jack would probably just slap his hand away. He doesn’t look as bad as he did back when they were on the other side of the park, but he’s looking more and more tired by the second.

Should be normal, though. Michael doesn’t feel as sharp either. His head is still aching from when he accidentally tried to connect with the people in the tower.

Neena presses her lips together and screws her eyes shut, her good side collapsing against the trunk as she turns on her back and drops her head back against it with the softest of thuds. She’s in pain, but it seems like she’s stopped bleeding a while ago. Michael wishes, not for the first time, that he was a healer like Calum, so he could at least try and take some of the pain away, but that’s not his magick, and he isn’t sure she’d let him touch her, either.

“Don’t look,” Jack instructs, looking away from her himself.

It must be some secret code between people that are naturally hostile, so Michael does as told.

He walks a step closer to Jack, so Neena won’t hear, and tells him: “I’m sorry I accused you of telling Order about Death Valley’s location, being the one responsible for everyone dying in the human village above. I shouldn’t have.” 

Jack turns to look at him, and the surprise in his eyes is very poorly masked by the mock that the rest of his face produces. “Ah, so you’ve finally realized you were wrong?”

“I was right about everything else,” Michael says, raising his eyebrows. “You did manipulate me, Ashton, the others… as much as you could, every chance you had. Don’t tell me I wasn’t right about _that_.”

Jack shrugs, sighing and looking away from Michael too. He runs his hands over his hair to try and take it away from his eyes, but it’s a bit too long, curling at the ends and coming back to his face the second he releases the curls. 

“You talk about manipulation as if it’s such a dirty thing.” He pauses, as if he expects Michael to interrupt him, but he doesn’t. He’s making sure Neena’s still put, and that the others haven’t come back yet. Jack waits for him to look back at him, and then adds: “You should learn to use it to your favor, you know that? It’ll keep you alive for longer.”

It is, without a doubt, the most Jack’s cared about him: giving him advice. 

He doesn’t take it for granted.

“I know,” he says.

* * *

Only Jason comes back, breathless and still holding a knife that’s been soaked in blood. Or been thrust someone’s body, more likely. A second of panic settles, and Michael’s eyes search for Geordie with a newborn lump in his throat, but as he climbs up the trunk awkwardly but fast, he sees her on the other side, by a side entrance, with two bodies on the ground next to her. One only looks unconscious, but the other has a slit on his throat and blood still coming out.

Michael winces, landing on his feet, and his head hurts some more.

Jack and Neena come next, but he can’t hear them. It’s like he’s in a gymnasium all over again, sounds echoing but faint at the same time, like no noise ever exists outside his head. He looks at Geordie as if she could tell, but she can’t, just tilts her head to the side to signal the urgency.

Michael looks up just once more, at the sun and its impossible dry warmth, and thinks to himself that this is not the day he dies. If anything, the prophecy has served him this much: to know that there’s more he has to do before he closes his eyes for good.

He wishes he’d pressed Ashton for more of the prophecy he had seen himself, the one where he saw Luke use his mind control fabricated magick. He wishes he knew whether he saw something that has already happened or that is yet to happen, and so, Luke’s safe.

Or as safe as one can be.

He wishes he knew whether Ashton could be behind these walls, and he’d have something good to say to Harry when he sees him next; would be able to look Dennis in the eye and say that he’s kept his promise. But he just doesn’t know. With the promise he’s made Dennis and the one he’s made Neena to keep him safe he’s piling up promises he doesn’t know he can keep.

“This way,” Neena says, her voice breaking.

Michael looks at her and his frown deepens. She’s moving towards the entrance next to Geordie; it looks like it must’ve been a door at some point, but now it opens to a high ceiling with nothing to close it. Geordie’s face is blank of worry, blank of pain, and Michael realizes, with some worry of himself, that this is her face of war. This is what she must’ve looked like all the while when she was killing people and doing what Daryl paid her to do, in safety and food and a roof over her head, but also in money.

He presses his lips together, and follows a limping Neena. 

Behind him, Jack’s hands wrap tightly around the ropes of his improvised backpack, and Jason follows on his trail, with the knife still on his hand, and his face just as expressionless as Geordie’s. It hurts to watch, Michael thinks, but then again, Jason did have a point when he called Michael on the things he had and hadn’t seen: this he hasn’t, not really, not as much as the two of them have. 

The place is as free of vegetation as the rest of the abandoned amusement park. At this time, probably reaching midday, with the sun at its strongest, there’s still light that has to be from fire coming from somewhere up. It makes him uneasy, the thought that the Queen can be there, but he tries not to waste any time with the thoughts.

Geordie stays behind so Neena will be the first in, her rifle poking at the back of the girl in a way that makes her arch her back. Neena glares at Geordie but says nothing, and then Geordie disappears through the entrance, and Michael’s next.

He doesn’t know what the tower is made of, but it looks like large rocks on top of even larger ones, and he’s met with a breeze of cold when he first walks in. He looks down and his boots meet humid ground. Ahead there’s a narrow corridor that elevates in a circular fashion, to take them to the second floor.

Neena points ahead, but Geordie doesn’t retreat the barrel of her gun from the girl’s back, and they keep going. 

Michael feels as if he should interfere, but he can’t. Right now, he can’t even speak.

It’s too much. His hearing is reducing to almost nothing, the complete deafness of one ear seeming to expand to the other so he’s got next to nothing. He doesn’t voice his concerns, doesn’t do or say a thing, just keeps walking ahead and up, in the middle of the group, trying to swallow the lump in his throat.

His magick keeps licking at his ankles, at his wrists, at the scar on his neck. It wants to come alive and connect with all the pain in this tower and all the people that are there and have been there once. The call is as overwhelming as the need to say no to it.

So he keeps walking, without being able to hear his steps, but meaning for them to be quiet.

The world is mute but he can see everything. Every step of the way he looks down at his feet, at the solid rocks beneath them, touches the dark walls lightly with his fingers so he’s close to the wall that keeps going up as it rounds the inside of the tower. He forces his breath to come out steady even though it’s hard; imagines Luke’s command in his head for him to just _breathe_. He does an okay job, he thinks, inhaling the cool air and managing to hold his breath for a second before he releases again, trying to get to a calmer pace.

Jack says something, His voice fogging into a chunk Michael can’t decipher, and he frowns in frustration, keeping his head down as he keeps walking, but Jack insists, his tone tilting towards annoyance this time. Again, Michael pretends like the faraway buzz doesn’t make him feel like screaming, just so he can hear something he understands.

Then, Jack touches his shoulder.

He slows down his steps, looking behind him. There’s a question on Jack’s forehead, even though his lips aren’t moving this time. He doesn’t look as annoyed as he had sounded before, and Michael clears his throat, pointing at his cut in half ear with an exasperated look on his face.

Jack’s eyes glance to his ear, then back at Michael’s eyes. He blinks a couple of times, parting his lips. Behind him, Jason slows down too, eyes inquisitive just enough that it breaks the spell of nothingness that his war eyes had been before.

Michael sets his jaw, looking over his shoulder. Geordie and Neena keep going, either unaware of them coming to a complete stop, or not caring. They should probably keep going.

Jack taps his shoulder, and he turns again, sighing bitterly.

Jack chews on his bottom lip for a second, searching Michael’s face for something. He wants to say that he knows it’s frustrating, much more on his end, but he isn’t sure what his voice would sound like -- it comes and goes, the intensity of the deafness, sometimes the echoing only lasting for seconds, minutes, sometimes hours or days. 

Before he can force himself to speak, Jack gestures at himself, and sticks his tongue out, rolling his eyes back. It’s funny, a word Michael’s not used to associating with Jack, so he tilts his head to the side in confusion. Jack sighs, and turns to Jason.

Jason rolls his eyes, takes Michael’s hand, and presses it to Jack’s forehead.

_Oh._

Jason lets go of Michael’s hand, and his hand stays on Jack’s burning forehead for another second. Now that he’s felt it on the back of his hand, he can’t help but notice how glassy Jack’s eyes are, too. 

He removes his hand with a pause.

He turns to Geordie and tries calling her name as quietly as he can. He’s not sure how much sound he makes, so he does it again, and this time, he can hear something, though it’s maybe only inside his head. She stops, and pulls Neena’s shoulder back abruptly. She stumbles but doesn’t fall, and Geordie keeps the rifle on her back as she looks back at them. Her lips move and she asks something that Michael can’t catch. Jason says something else, but he’s pointing at Jack, maybe to Michael’s benefit.

Michael takes the improvised backpack from Jack’s back, and his fingers go nervously through his things to try and find something to help. He wishes he had some medicine, but it isn’t the case. All he has is some food rations, two bottles of water -- though one is empty -- and the box.

Opia, and adrenaline.

Three little bottles of Opia, four shots of adrenaline.

On his knees with the hands on the box, he looks up at Jack.

He gets what the bad mimic meant now. He’s dying. Must feel like he is, at least, and suddenly it isn’t funny at all. He’s not sure what is it, but the abrupt weather change must be to blame. He’s feverish, and growing paler by the minute.

His index finger dances around the shot of adrenaline, trying to think of something else, of some alternative. If he uses it on Jack, there’s only three to help whoever they find in the tower. But if he doesn’t, there’s no telling how much more walking Jack can take, and, in the case they find some unpleasant company, Jack will be the easiest target.

Michael presses his lips together hard, and wraps his fingers around the adrenaline.

He puts the box down, and gives a look that he hopes is meaningful to Jason.

Wordlessly -- or at least wordlessly to Michael -- Jason moves to wrap the backpack up again. Geordie and Neena are a couple of stairs ahead, waiting. That leaves Michael and Jack, Jack looking at him but barely keeping his eyes open, and Michael’s not sure he’s registered what’s happening next.

He takes a deep breath, and presses his palm to Jack’s mouth. Jack frowns, insulted, and Michael sinks the syringe of modified adrenaline on his neck.

Jack’s scream muffles against Michael’s pressing palm, and he screws his eyes shut, tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. His body jerks up, but Michael’s palm follows until the scream dies, and when he removes both the empty syringe and his hand, Jack stares at him, wide-eyed and panting.

Michael’s hearing is still a mess of faint echoes, but he can see just fine.

With his chest going up and down rapidly, Jason handing him the backpack and Jack putting it back on, Jason looks at him through tears, but there’s color spreading over his cheeks and nose. His lips already look rosier, and Michael reads them as Jack mouths: 

“Thank you.”

Michael half-smiles to him, his head pounding, but he tries not to show.

He gestures his head up, so they get back to moving, and Jack seals his lips as if he’s trying to contain his breath, his nostrils flaring as his body struggles against his mind. But he nods. And so Michael nods to Geordie and Neena, and so they walk the last few stairs until they reach the first floor.

It must be almost ten minutes of walking up. It’s tense, and his shoulders hurt more than his legs and feet. He feels the shivers going up his spine as he moves, the soaked through shirt gluing back to his back but it isn’t hot in here at all. It’s ten minutes of looking over his shoulder every few seconds, to make sure Jack’s come down from the burning high that the modified adrenaline gives at first, and that he hasn’t collapsed since -- his eyes are still glossy and the fever is still very much there, but his body has been given strength, the drug ignoring the body’s commands to stop and rest because he needs it.

To different extents, they all need it. Probably Neena the most, with a wound on the side of her body that has only stopped bleeding recently. But nobody stops again, not for those long ten minutes.

The moans float away and come to them two or three minutes before they get to the first floor. Michael can’t make out the words, but the natural adrenaline produced by his body must be enough to sharpen his senses. 

Neena and Geordie stop first, and he hears Geordie say: “Well, fuck me.”

Michael understands when he stands next to her. 

It’s an enormous room that expands over almost all of the floor. It expands all the way to the other side, where more stairs keep going up. There are no doors, and the few windows are covered with something that looks like leather. There are oil lamps all over the room, ten in total, five on each side, illuminating just dimly enough that they can see around.

There are mattresses spread to both sides of the room, but the middle is free for walking.

On the mattresses, there are people. People like Michael hasn’t seen in a long time. People with their skin blotched in angry red, people with horns on their foreheads, feathers stuck out of their skinny shoulders that seem to have been interrupted midway. There must be around twenty people in the room, some sleeping, some moaning in pain and desperation. 

Michael holds his breath, and searches the room for familiar faces.

He can’t see anyone he knows.

His heart starts hammering on his chest. No Luke. No Ashton. No anyone he knows.

Neena snorts: “Lucky bastards.”

Michael can’t quite hold his breath anymore, not really. 

There’s no Luke to tell him to keep breathing, so he feels like he can’t.

Their shock is disrupted by an old man with their back to them, on rags that let his back showing, spikes coming out of his spine. He turns in their direction to throw up away from his mattress. He looks more sickly than the rest of the group. Michael watches the scene like he’s having an out of body experience.

Jason swears under his breath, and that Michael can’t hear very well, but then comes the desperate: “Grandpa,” that Michael does listen. And then he’s running to the man, kneeling beside him, and Michael feels tears in his eyes even though it’s not his relief to take. Geordie slowly walks to Jason and his grandfather too, looking like she’s walking on a tightrope.

He turns to Jack, helpless, feeling like he’ll collapse.

Jack points to the stairs at the end of the corridor, depositing all his hope there. So Michael does too. He nods, fast, swallowing the tears and the pain.

And then Neena screams.


	42. now we’re in the ring and we’re coming for blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I COULD NOT BE HAPPIER ABOUT THIS CHAPTER. i hope you like it!!! let me know your thoughts! ♥

Her scream pierces through his deaf ear and the one that listens. It pierces through his soul as if to make a room in his head specific for this moment, so he’ll never forget.

Michael’s eyes widen as he turns to Neena. 

Everyone in the room is shocked. The asleep become acutely aware of their presence, the ill turning their heads in the direction of the girl, and Michael, Jack, Jason and Geordie, all look at Neena at once. Nobody moves and nobody speaks, and the blow is big enough that nobody tries to stop her. She screams until there’s no more air in her lungs, and when she stops, her eyes are also big, but there’s mischief making them sparkle. 

She tilts her chin up, proud of herself.

Michael swallows hard, looking around, searching the faces of their friends for some help. It doesn’t come. They’ve all been caught off guard, they’d all stopped paying attention.

Now, they’d all pay the price.

“We have to move,” Jack says, the first to come to terms with it. 

Jack starts forward, and Michael follows, holding Neena’s eyes for another second. He feels like he’s going to throw up, but she doesn’t look away from him, the savage grin still on her face. As Jason puts his arms around his grandfather and urges him to sit up so he can be carried, Geordie turns around and lunges towards Neena, but with Geordie’s possibly dislocated shoulder and Michael on her way, she doesn’t go far. He catches her in his arms, looking her in the eyes and saying: “It isn’t worth it.”

Geordie’s eyes are glassy with tears, and Michael can’t tell if it’s because she’s seen Jason’s grandfather still alive and remembered that hers can’t be, or if she’s just angry at Neena for having screamed so people will know they’re there, angry at Michael for having let Neena lead the way that’s brought them there and, ultimately, will likely get them killed.

Michael turns around to look at Neena one more time. She’s giving him an odd look, like his words have stuck to her, and she’s considering their meaning. If it’s her that isn’t worth it, or just fighting her. Michael looks away and back at Geordie, his hand touching her good shoulder to try and get her to turn back to Jason. Jack’s already knelt down next to the old man, trying to make himself helpful. He still looks feverish, but by how agile the adrenaline’s made him, nobody could tell.

Geordie snorts, and when she breaks free from Michael’s embrace, she spits on the ground in Neena’s direction. Neena gives her one smirk before she’s down the stairs, as fast as her limping body allows. Michael lets go of Geordie only once he’s sure Neena’s out of sight.

“Grandpa, please,” Jason begs, and Michael comes closer.

The man must be nearing eighty, and Michael’s never seen a human that old. In the city, the oldest he’s seen must have been half of that, and it’s unnerving to think of why he hadn’t seen any humans older before. It makes him come to a halt, a few feet away from the men with veiny hands that takes Jason’s hands in his. They share the same brown skin color, but the man’s skin is wrinkled with old age and saggy skin of someone who’s been denied food. He’s dirty, too, and getting closer to him, Michael notices the strong smell of urine that lingers to the beds.

The man tries to say something, but coughs blood on his own chest instead.

Beside him, Geordie swears under her breath.

Around, the murmurs starts. There isn’t a single human in the room that ignores their presence there, but few seem to have the lungs to voice any feelings. A few of them try to scream too, a cracked and broken sound that can’t alert anyone that Neena hasn’t already alerted, but is disturbing nonetheless. The rest is just background noise, along with Michael’s thumping heart.

“I won’t leave,” the manages eventually, patting Jack’s hand away from him so he’ll hold Jason’s with both of his. Jack retreats with a deep frown on his face, but doesn’t get up just yet. “I can’t have more than hours to leave,” he argues, raising his eyebrows, apologetically.

Jason chokes, shaking his head vehemently, holding his grandfather’s hands. “No, please, just let us help. We’ll get you out of here. There’s time.”

“Not for me, there isn’t,” the man smiles. He still has most teeth in his mouth, but they’re stained red. “Listen, Noshaba’s here. You can find her… and save her.”

Michael turns to Geordie with a frown. 

“Leader of the humans up north,” she replies quietly to Michael’s frown, without looking away from Jason and his old man. As her frown deepens, she adds: “Don’t know what she’s doing this far south. She… shouldn’t be here.”

“They’re giving you witch blood, aren’t they,” Jack says. “They’re trying to recreate the magick drug, but for humans.” 

His voice has grown heavy and dark, like Michael hasn’t listened to him speak before. He’s forgotten just how personal this is to Jack, that was there from the start, stealing the pill that has given Luke the magick that eventually also gave him the scars all over his chest. Michael looks at Jack and suddenly he wants to cry too, or just leave. Leave and never have to look back and think about how messed up it is, and that there are humans coming to get them, and make sure they have the same fate as the people in this room. Or the people upstairs.

Luke must be upstairs. They have to get upstairs.

The man turns to Jack, sighing heavily. He nods, only once. “Not all live. Most of us die. I know I am dying,” he adds, cocking an eyebrow, and coughs blood once more when he tries to smile.

Jack presses his lips in a thin line, standing up.

“They’re draining them,” Michael adds, to no one specific and to them all at the same time.

Jason’s grandfather nods again, with a small smile.

“She’s playing God,” the man trails off, and his head lolls back, as he stares at the ceiling and struggles to keep breathing. Jason calls for him, holds his hands tighter, cries out quietly. “She’s going to end us all,” he adds, in a whisper. 

Jason shakes his head no, and it hurts to look at him. Michael thinks, absentmindedly, that this is what the sun would look like if all the light was stolen from it. Jason holds his grandpa’s hands and his shoulders go up in tension. He’s choking on his sobs, but still trying to make himself sound brave. The craziest thing is that he sounds at his bravest still.

“Please, ‘pa, just… just fight. You’ll get through this.”

The man sighs heavily, his expression heavy with loss, and Michael changes his mind: it doesn’t hurt to look at Jason as much as it hurts to look at both of them. He thinks of leaving Daryl for his luck, kissing his forehead goodbye, and the last glance he casted Karen’s way before she left in the car and his life changed forever when the guards took him in front of the school. He thinks of losing his parents, and of losing his friends, and of losing Luke, and realizes that nobody walks away freely: everyone loses something, and they’re lucky if it’s not everything.

“Listen,” he repeats, tightening the grip on Jason’s wrists. 

As if on cue, there’s a noise, something distant but approaching, and Michael shifts his weight nervously to the other foot. It’s loud enough that it comes out strong even through the mumbles and groans of the humans that have been given witch blood. Even Michael’s partial deafness can’t escape the alarming truth: that more people are coming. People to detain them.

“I tried to talk some sense into her,” the man says, his eyes both glassy, either by tears or sickness; likely both. “When I found out she was still alive, I tried…. I swear that I tried. I thought I could talk some sense into her. Because of you. But she didn’t listen. She’s made up her mind.”

The man’s smile then is strange, like guilt might bring him down faster than the poisoned blood running in his veins. Michael watches Geordie and Jason exchange a frown, and this time he gets the message that passes between them; the confusion clear even for Michael and Jack.

There’s noise from above, and at first Michael’s sure that they’re being shot at, just can’t tell from where they’re coming. They all tense and look around, only to realize that the noise comes from the heavy rain hitting the covered windows and the roof a floor above ruthlessly. It’s started to rain again, but the rocks that build the tower only let in humidity and coolness, so they must’ve missed the shift in the weather. 

Jack meets Michael’s eyes, and his lips move.

Michael feels time slow down, or maybe stop completely.

A bullet cuts air close to his deaf ear, and he may not hear the sound, but he feels the wind that it causes, feels his skin scratch with it, and when he turns, wide-eyed, he finds behind him a man in ragged clothes that cover most of his body going down. He turns back, and finds Geordie with her rifle raised, still aiming behind him.

Michael presses his lips together, and when he releases them, he lets out: “Fuck.”

Behind the man falling down, come more. They carry weapons as big as Geordie’s, guns and knives and one woman has two blades that look big enough to be swords. Michael has never seen anything like it. They all have half their faces covered, and though they’re wet from the rain they’ve faced to get in the tower, they look like proper soldiers. Like the ones they’ve faced in the capital when they -- Luke, Geordie, Halsey and Michael -- freed Ashton from his cell in the prison.

Faceless nameless people. Easier to kill. Still going to be a part of Michael’s nightmares.

He closes his eyes, and allows them to roll back.

The conflicting magick inside of him, opposing sides of the same source of power, seem to come together. In a split second he feels the pulsating energy of everyone in the room: of the ones lying scared and in pain on thin mattresses on the ground, of his friends, raising to fight, and of their enemies. He counts seven, all coming from the same set of stairs as they did, so there’s probably no one working for the Queen upstairs.

He doesn’t feel Neena in the room at all.

Once he opens his eyes, his body feels different. It’s as if he could bend them all at wish, connect to more than one if he wanted to, make of their bones and organs what he pleased. He doesn’t try, though, can’t bring himself to risk that much with so many people he cares about in the room in case something goes wrong. But it’s still something else entirely, different than any other way he’s called his magick -- the licking at his wrists and ankles feels cooler and deeper, like there are pins softly grazing at his insides, not hurting but making themselves noticed. It curls around his neck, vibrates stronger along the line of the scar on his neck, and though his deaf ear is useless, he doesn’t feel as imbalanced as he’s been feeling lately, ever since the explosion.

He feels perfectly in balance.

And as Geordie fires the second shot and docks to not be hit, a storm of bullets come their way. Jason shields his grandfather with his body, embracing him closer, and Jack curls himself smaller, but Michael doesn’t move away. All he can do is focus on the shooter with the bigger gun, a mean thing that seems to not need to be reloaded, and feels the man’s breath in his lungs, the man’s rising and falling of chest on his own.

Time must indeed slow down, because to him, it takes forever. 

But once he wraps his fingers around nothing and abruptly drops his wrist to the side, he knows it can’t have been more than a few seconds either. The man letting the gun drop and falling to the ground, gasping desperately for air even as the thud makes his colleagues look.

A knife is thrown, and Michael knows it’s from Jason without turning. 

And then, when the woman with the blades locks eyes with him and starts moving his way, and only then, Michael breathes out and tries to run up the stairs. 

His eyes still rolled back, he feels her vibrant and powerful energy following him.

Michael runs as fast as his lungs will let him, but he doesn’t get very far at all. Before he reaches the end of the stairs something slashes at his ankle, and he feels himself lose balance. Blinking his eyes back to normal and with no weapons in him, he turns around just in time to fall seated on the dirty ground, turning to the woman. 

His ankle starts bleeding, the place where the blade cut him burning and sending shivers up his spine. She stares down at him, tilting her head up, balancing both blades in her hands. Behind her, all hell breaks loose, with Jack, Jason and Geordie busy enough with keeping themselves alive.

His breath a mess, he tries to stand up, but his ankle starts pooling blood, and it hurts too much to rest his weight on that foot. He tries to crawl away without turning his back on her, and though he can’t see more than her eyes, it’s as if she’s grinning.

 _Think, think, think._ But he can’t.

He can’t escape, and no one can save him.

He closes his eyes, tries calling his magick back, but the pain on his ankle doesn’t let him focus. A thunder slashes the sky as the rain grows heavier still, and all he can think of is that if he could listen closely to the sound of the blade against his skin, that’s what it would sound like.

When she lunges at him, he tries kicking her off, trying to avoid the blades as she buries them again and again on the wooden floor as he struggles to one side and another. She’s good at aiming from a distance, but this up close, with the panic running down Michael’s veins and making him move fast, their bodies are tangled together and it just takes too much effort.

Everything does. His kicking and trying to get a hold of her wrists. Her grunts of frustration as she tries kneeing him so he’ll stop struggling, her knives reaching for him closer and closer still.

Michael holds his breath, staring at her. She holds his eyes, and with her voice muffled through the cloth covering her face, she says: “You’re Neena’s.” 

His eyes widen.

Neena wants his magick. 

He knows there won’t be any time. Even if he manages to ignore the nagging at his ankle, the burning that had just prevented him from standing up, he still doesn’t have the second he needs to beg for his magick to come back to him. The human raises her long knife against his throat, and smirks up at him. He tilts his head back, trying to struggle away from it, but she’s too heavy against him and any big movement might slash his throat.

He holds his breath, the sharpness of the blade breaking his skin very softly, almost as a sick caress. She comes closer, and in a whisper, tells him: “I can’t kill you yet. But I will hurt you.”

The smirk floats in her voice, and then she’s holding his face. She forces his head to the side, tracing the blade along the scar of his neck and the cut on his ear. He feels like throwing up, lying still and still not allowing himself to breathe. It’s sickening, the weight of the blade against the scars, and he can tell what she means to do: she wants to open the wounds again. The wounds that Daryl stitched closed.

His eyes fill up as he stares at the end of the stairs. What’s on his mind is that there are worse things than dying, like having a sharp long knife being touched to the scars he doesn’t even like touched with his own fingertips.

Bile rises up his throat, but he tries swallowing it down, all so he’ll move the least possible.

She chuckles, a distant sound to the equally distant sounds of storm and fighting, the grunts and grumbles of pain of the humans on the mattresses that have merged to the rest of the sounds Michael wishes he wasn’t hearing.

With his face turned, the tear slides over the bridge of his face and falls to the dusty floor.

She starts sinking the knife on his ear, and then the knife falls heavily on his face, making him blink and turn back with a frown of confusion. He catches sight of the woman on top of him screaming mutely with her head jolted back, electricity making her arms shake involuntarily, and her chest light up like she’s a supernova. It’s different than it was with Neena. Much, much different. On top of him, the woman is shocked with enough electricity that Michael watches in the few seconds it takes, all life drain from her face, until she collapses on top of him again. 

This time, lifeless.

Michael closes his eyes, taking a deep, deep breath. 

Still lying on the ground, he pushes her body away from him, and it rolls to the side. The knife still next to his face and his eyes screwed shut, he lets his chest go up and down with the panic that he forced himself to smother when moving meant a blade cutting his skin. He must only lie there for a few seconds, but it’s enough that he feels self-conscious of the danger, pulling himself to sit up even as his ankle throbs with pain, but has apparently stopped bleeding.

Michael counts eight bodies on the floor, which means more people came after he made the woman with the blades turn away. But he’d known they could handle the guns, knew they’d be alright. He sits there and looks at them, choking up on the tears that threaten to come again. Jack is still turned his way, electricity dancing like coins over his knuckles. His eyes are still black, and he’s out of breath. Geordie’s hurt shoulder is slumped down, like it either dislocated for good or it broke this time. Her arm falls numbly to her side, and there’s blood on her face, but judging by her expression, it can’t be hers. She has the rifle on the other hand now.

Jason’s rushing back to his grandfather, and he’s sobbing. They’re talking to each other, but Michael can’t listen anymore. He’s entered the gymnasium of his mind, everything echoing and distant, sounds there but so vague he has to struggle to get out one sound alone. And all the sounds are the rain.

Geordie’s looking down at Jason and his grandfather, but Michael looks around at the death and at the humans that were given witch blood. Half of them look too sick to even acknowledge what’s happened, the other half furious and trying to scream but voices or lungs failing them.

The math isn’t too complicated to add up: part of them must have been taken, like Jason’s grandfather, and the other half awarded with the chance of becoming a witch. Neena wants a spot here. She wants Michael’s magick.

He swallows, taking a deep breath, and Jack takes a few steps more his way, offering his hand. Michael stares at it for a second, and Jack blinks his eyes back, the electricity vanishing just as fast.

Michael takes his hand, and lets Jack help him to his feet.

“Jason can’t go now,” Jack tells him, instead of coaxing a thank you from Michael, or asking how he’s doing, or wondering about the blood damping the end of his pants, disappearing inside the boot. “While there’s still a storm, I can still help. No one will get past us, past me.”

Frowning, he sinks his teeth on his bottom lip, staring at Jack.

“You don’t want to go upstairs?”

“I do, but,” Jack shakes his head, looking away. His eyes are a darker blue than Luke’s, but there’s still so much of Luke in Jack’s face that it makes it difficult to look at him for too long. Jack calls Geordie’s name, and while she approaches, Jack adds: “There won’t be any hunters upstairs. They have to come from downstairs, and I can stop them better than she can. Just bring my brother and Joel and whoever you can find, and we’ll get out of this hell hole.”

Michael looks down.

Joel. He had forgotten Jack was expecting to find Joel here too.

Michael nods, swallowing the lump in his throat. Geordie stops by his side, wincing as she steps, but she can handle pain a lot better than Michael ever could. He tries to keep his eyes away from her shoulder, courtesy of her never staring directly at the scar on his neck and ear, but it’s difficult.

Jack presses something to his hand, and he finds the little box of metal there.

He nods once more, and just like that, Geordie and him are going up the stairs, with Jason and Jack behind as their protectors, the last barrier to get to them. 

They march on.

* * *

The stairs go up and up and it’s seemingly endless. At least for a boy with an injured ankle and a girl with a probably broken arm. They try to move fast, and in Michael’s head they must, because even in the cool humid air of the tower, they still sweat a lot, but they can’t be moving fast enough if it takes so long. They go three, four, five flights of stairs, and it’s still not enough.

Michael doesn’t question it anymore. He just keeps going. Ignore the pain on his ankle, keep breathing, on autopilot and full of mechanic instincts, but none of them are to run away. Not anymore. Not after so much. 

He’s there to rescue his boyfriend and as many of his people as he can. And he realizes, going up the stairs in steps that have him struggling, that his people aren’t ever like him. There’s only one of him, half Chaos and half Order, but before when they were attacked and he acted on instinct, the two had collided in one. What Halsey had said about magick hierarchy being simply political makes more sense as he goes. His people aren’t his people because they share magick: Chaos people are his people just as stray Order witches are. Humans are his people too. His people are the ones struggling like he is. His people are the fighters that had no choice but to become warriors. 

They finally reach the ward, an enormous room that expands but has no candles or light of any sort. There’s only darkness, and it takes a few seconds for both of them to adjust to it.

Then shadows start to take shape.

Three people in the room, each with their wrists chained above their heads as their bodies lie on the ground without any mattresses underneath them. Tubes come out of their arms and in their noses, and bags of blood hang from a pole next to each of them.

Three. Only three.

Luke.

Ashton.

Caleb.

Michael’s heart skips a beat. For a split second, there’s absolutely nothing between him and the euphoria that he’s finally found Luke. That he was almost killed in the same building as he was, and that they’re all bloodied and very fucking lost in the mess none of them asked for, but still. Still, he found Luke, and if that much happened, everything is going to be okay.

Though his ankle burns, he forces his feet to work; one after the other in Luke’s direction like there’s nothing else that matters and nothing will again once he touches his face and takes him out of there for good. But the closer he gets, the more he sees that isn’t right. Luke’s eyes are closed, but there’s a frown on his face. He’s alive, chest going up and down rapidly, but he isn’t alright. He’s convulsing. 

Michael shoots Geordie a look, and she nods, says, “On it. Take care of him,” and goes to Ashton, equally unconscious, but just as likely to be alive. 

Michael sinks down to his knees next to Luke, his bottom lip quivering, searching his face for something other than bruises and blood, other than the frown of pain and the something vibrating through him that makes his whole body shake.

He doesn’t know what to do.

He takes another deep breath, looking up at the high ceiling, and remembers coffee stains on motel room ceilings. And the storm at the motel. It’s the storm. Luke’s having a bad nightmare because of the storm.

His hands shaking and his heart climbing up his throat, he tentatively touches the side of Luke’s face. Luke jerks to the side, the tubes entering his nostrils too tight so it must be painful to move. Michael’s thumb traces over his jawline as he presses his lips in a thin line, trying to think of something that will bring Luke back to him.

“Luke,” he chokes, holding Luke’s shoulders and forcing him to still.

Nothing.

Behind him, he hears Geordie bringing Ashton to consciousness, exchanging a few words before she moves to wake up Caleb. But it’s just background noise, and he barely registers. He squeezes Luke’s shoulders and begs him please, please, please. Calls him name again and again and again, and when the sobs start coming up his throat, his fingers bury on Luke’s shoulders like needles, and with a frown on his face, he calls him once more.

“Luke, please!”

Luke’s eyes snap open, and he gasps for air, jerking away from Michael’s touch once more.

Michael sits back on his knees, staring, wide-eyed.

Luke seems to swallow air in chunks, his body no longer shaking but beads of sweat collecting on his forehead, wetting dried blood. He keeps gasping, his eyes watering as he stares ahead, and Michael feels something inside him bend and break.

He reaches for Luke’s face once more, his fingers trembling against the skin.

“You’re alive,” he murmurs, more to make himself believe than to communicate.

Luke turns to him with a frown, and his eyes only meet for a split second before his face changes into a grimace, and he struggles to get away from Michael’s hand. “Let go of me!” he yells, louder than Michael thought his lungs would let him. “Stop fucking with my head!” he adds, louder still, shaking his body away, the chains around his wrists and above his head cutting into the skin deep enough that it starts bleeding. By the looks of it, again.

Michael retreats in shock, with lips parted and a twinge on his chest.

His stomach sinks, and he shakes his head.

“No, Luke, it’s me, alright? It’s Michael, please, just,” he tries, fighting against the urge of coming closer, of touching him again. Luke turns to him in disgust, but doesn’t let his eyes stay there. He turns away and tries to bring his body further away from Michael, but it only makes more blood come licking down his pale arms. “Stop, Luke, you’re hurting yourself. Please just.”

He covers his mouth, both hands shaking now, and his teeth sink on his bottom lip. He tastes something metallic in his tongue, and bets it’s his blood too.

“We shared a shared motel room just outside the city,” he starts, talking over Luke’s tantrum and the shaking of his head, “you rescued me from my cell. You--”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Luke interrupts him in a mantra, eyes screwed shut.

Michael swallows back his climbing heart and tries again. “You were good to me! You were good to me from the start and I couldn’t believe someone like you existed. I fell in love with you and I didn’t know what to do with myself when I thought about losing you. I used to have dreams and I’d wake up and find you sleeping with me and it wasn’t so bad,” he trails off, has to stop, has to force a pause. He’s crying.

Luke’s stopped talking over him, but his chest is going up and down fast, and his eyes are still closed tightly, face turned away from Michael.

Michael takes a deep breath, staring down at his scraped knees.

In a whisper, he adds: “You bought me gummy bears.”

Luke opens his glassy eyes, turning to Michael with a deep frown. He sounds tentative when he says: “You’re real,” like he doesn’t entirely believe it. Michael nods just once, quietly, and Luke drops his head back against the stone wall, breathing out heavily. A smirk comes to his lips, malicious but somehow sad too. “Think the universe is trying to send us a message?”

Michael frowns, cautiously still away from Luke. “Sorry?”

“One always chained,” he opens his eyes again, meeting his eyes. There’s a glint of maniac in his smile, even though his lips are almost white and there’s blood staining his teeth. “We have to stop meeting like this.” 

Michael laughs, chokes on it, shaking his head and smiling almost shyly. Slowly so he can be stopped, he brings his face closer to Luke’s, and presses his lips to Luke’s cheek. Luke sighs close to him, this time sounding less like exasperation or relief, more like nostalgia, and Michael feels like sobbing, just wrapping his arms around him and crying until there are no more tears left in him. But that’s not what he does. He looks up at his wrists, fingertips tracing up the paleness of his arms until they reach the chains, and then he sets his jaw.

There will be big scars on his wrists later. Michael will make sure to kiss them when they’re not sore anymore. Because the wounds must turn into scars, as they _will_ make it out of there.

“You found me,” Luke says weakly, the strength that the rage gave him gone. 

“In hell, but I did,” Michael says, eyes focused on the chains. It feels to steel, and he has no idea if he can crack it open without hurting Luke, but he’s managed to break the bracelet that kept Jack prisoner without hurting him, so his chances are good.

“Hey,” Luke calls his attention, and Michael looks at him again.

Even like this, with hair glued to his forehead in sweat, blood on his mouth, tubes that connect to his nose and his arms, he’s still breath-taking. Michael holds his breath.

“We’re in hell, alright. But we’re together.”

Michael smiles at him.

“Um, guys,” Geordie says, coming closer. Michael watches Luke watch her, register the way she holds the rifle close to her chest so she won’t have to hold her uselesss arm. “Ashton’s conscious but he’s drifting away all the time. Caleb’s conscious, but he lost his arm in the explosion, so it’s his legs that are chained. I don’t know what to do,” she frowns.

Michael’s heart sinks once more. 

They can’t win.

“Geor,” Luke tells her, and his voice is fond and sweet, if anything for a moment. She gives him a brief smile, and then his face changes, a shadow passing it, and he tries to yank his hands away from the chain once more, but it only cuts deeper into his skin. He sighs. “You… you can’t be here. Alright? You have to leave. Before she comes.”

Geordie snorts. “The Queen?” 

There’s disdain in her voice; mock affront. 

Luke licks his lips, and coughs. Not nearly as bad as Jason’s grandfather was, but weak all the same. He shakes his head, frowning, and when he looks at Geordie again, that wary look is back. 

“She’s no Queen. The people here call her that, but that’s not how _we_ call her.”

Geordie frowns, and Michael can tell she holds her breath.

“It’s Ilana, Geordie,” Luke says. “Diana’s mother is alive, and she’s their Queen.” 

Michael’s hand drops from Luke’s wrists. “Ilana as in the human leader in Death Valley? I thought she died in the explosion, the one that destroyed the human village… I don’t get it.”

Geordie’s eyes don’t leave Luke’s. They’re hard and hurt and full of things Michael doesn’t recognize. 

Geordie’s jaw sets, and she looks away from Luke, eyes setting on something ahead on the other side of the ward. She tilts her chin up in defiance, but her eyes are filling up fast with tears. “You,” she says, and it sounds like an insult.

Michael’s heart speeds up, and he turns to look.

There, by the end of the corridor, is the woman that made herself of vapor and erased his and Luke’s memory when she came prying back in the Big House, when it was still standing.

Ilana, floating until she isn’t, standing solid across from them, breaking into a smile as her eyes fall on Geordie. “I’ve missed you, love. Always thought you should be my second in command. Diana would have wanted that,” she says, taking a few steps in their direction, her eyes on Geordie the whole time, ignoring Caleb and Ashton’s grunts, Luke and Michael’s staring. “But you are not going to take away my blood bags.”

Luke tenses, and Michael stands up, next to Geordie.

He rolls his eyes back, ignoring the jolt of pain that shoots down his ankle. She disappears, and appears again close to his face. “Boo!” she says, before connecting her fist to his stomach.

Michael collapses forward, spitting blood.

And Geordie charges her rifle.

Time to fight their way out of hell.


	43. straight to hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO, BEAUTIFUL ROCKSTARS. with college and work i haven't been able to be online as often, but i'd just like to say a massive thank you for not giving up on me and on opia. if everything works out, i should have some time to reply to the wonderful comments this week, but every single one of them counts and makes my heart speed up. thank you so, so much.
> 
> AND NOW, I PRESENT YOU CHAPTER 43. it was one of my favorites to write, so i hope you have fun reading it!!! ^3^ enjoy!~

Michael doesn’t remember his first encounter with Ilana, the one she supposedly wiped from his mind, but he does remember the second time, her big eyes turning black, and how fast she left, how easily she floated around like gravity didn’t apply to her the same way it did to everyone else.

Her eyes aren’t black anymore. Or they are, but that isn’t all. They flicker between black and white, each time she blinks the color filling the space where irises should be effortlessly. Michael only has a second to register that as he frowns, and then her fist is connecting to his stomach again. She hits hard, harder than Jack had, harder than her human guard downstairs had, and harder than anyone he knows. She hits him, and it sucks all the air out of his lungs, and he’s gasping again, taking a few steps back, balling his fists.

Geordie groans as she points the gun at her and pulls the trigger without a second thought, but Ilana dissipates with a chuckle on her lips, floats higher up, and the bullet hits the stone wall and ricochets to further away from them.

“Don’t be like that, Geordie,” Ilana says, but Geordie’s pointing her rifle at Ilana once more, even though she winces in pain, her shoulder seemingly worse by the second.

She shoots again and, again, Ilana is too agile for her.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Ilana tells her, appearing closer to her face. Geordie swears under her breath and her eyes go wider as she takes a tentative step back. Michael presses his lips together, still breathing hard from the two consecutive punches on his stomach, but he sees Geordie’s fingers wrapping around the trigger of the gun again, rising it slowly. “I wouldn’t ever. You know how special you were to Diana? You know how much she loved you?”

Ilana’s words weight in morbid sincerity, a question loaded with sadness but, most of all, delusion.

Michael turns to Luke, but his eyes are shut and his face turned to the side, away from Ilana, like he can’t take it. It makes Michael’s heart sink, the thought of what Ilana must’ve done to him, to the three of them, and to whoever was there before and didn’t make it. Michael runs to Luke while Geordie still has Ilana’s attention, and tries to break the chains apart with his hands alone, but the chains are too thick and Luke’s struggling against him.

“Luke, it’s me,” he whispers, or tries to.

Luke shakes, first his head, then all of him. Outside, another thunder strikes, and Michael feels his chest stop with the possibility of Ilana having been downstairs already, met with Jack and Jason, leaving their bodies at her wake.

“No, please,” he asks, but Luke’s eyes are still screwed shut and he refuses to open them.

“Just leave,” Luke tells him, “leave while you still can. Alright? Get the fuck out of here.”

His voice cracks towards the end of it, and Michael shakes his head slowly, staring at Luke. Luke opens his eyes to meet Michael’s, and for a second, Michael can’t hear the world around him at all, but isn’t sure his partial deafness is to blame. All he sees is Luke and the pain in his eyes so rooted that he’s not sure all the love in the world can soothe it away.

And then he sees something deeper than that. He sees the terror, and his lips shaped into a scream, and a sharp pain in the back of his neck as his body collides against Luke’s.

He screams, raising his head as he raises his body off Luke’s, and turns to see Ilana behind him again, with her eyebrows raised, and Geordie running to her with red in her eyes.

“You’re not taking my blood bags, prince,” she says, with mock condescendation. “I need them.”

Geordie lunges at her, and for a second there, she has Ilana. Her nails sinking on the skin of Ilana’s bare arms, her rage marking her as she chokes on her sobs. Geordie’s crying hard enough that Michael can’t tell whether it’s all pure anger or if it’s betrayal and sadness as well.

As soon as Ilana feels her touch, though, she becomes vapor and escapes her easily, and Geordie sinks her teeth into her bottom lip this time, looking more broken than Michael’s ever seen her. He slowly brings his hand to the back of his neck, his fingers finding slickness there, but his eyes are on Geordie.

“Did Diana know?” she screams, turns around to face Ilana again. “Did she?!”

Ilana doesn’t answer. She’s looking at Geordie from a safe distance, and Michael can’t read her color-changing eyes.

“Did she know you’re a psychopath?! That you were supposed to keep us safe and you went and decided to kill us all instead?!”

“I can make you stronger,” Ilana says instead, smiling. It’s not a charming one, the smile that shapes her mouth, but it doesn’t look untrue either. It’s promising and raw, and it makes Michael’s head ache more -- or it’s just the hit taking effect and making him slow. “I bet you’d make it. You’re strong already. You were always the strongest of you three. That must’ve been why Di loved you.”

Geordie snorts, shakes her head, and her shoulders shake with how badly the sobs are making her chest move. With her body to shield him and Luke, though, he does the only thing he can think could buy them time and, hopefully, an escape route. He takes the little box of metal from the pocket of his jeans, thin and long, and with shaky fingers and his hearing fading, he takes one of the three remaining syringes.

“This is going to hurt,” Michael warns.

 

“You got it all wrong, baby,” Ilana says, sighing heavily, her voice a mix of desperation for understanding and something deeper, like a strive for connection, though that couldn’t be it. “I always had your best interest at heart. All of you. But humans are weak. That’s why we were always prey.”

Luke opens his eyes with a frown of confusion, and Michael holds his breath.

Geordie forces a bitter laugh out of her, and it’s the only thing that seems to calm down her crying. “I was never prey! Neither was Jason nor Diana, nor most of us. We were born in shitty places like this, and raised as bounty hunters to see everything like prizes. And then we became something else. We’re assassins. We’re killers. We’re _survivors_.”

She spits the last word, as if it’s meant to break Ilana’s whole world.

If her stunned silence is anything to go by, Michael supposes it does.

He sinks the syringe to Luke’s neck, and Luke’s head jerks back violently, as he gasps for air. Against his better judgement, Michael covers Luke’s mouth with his hand so he makes as little noise as possible. Luke’s frown deepens as he stares at Michael, looking cross.

“Listen,” Ilana starts, “I’m giving these people a chance at survival, not killing them. If they’re not strong enough to make it after they receive witch blood, that’s not on me. That’s on them.”

There’s a pause, a small pause, but it’s enough. Luke blinks a couple of times at Michael and Michael removes his hand from over Luke’s mouth. There’s a smirk forming on his lips, and his bloodied wrists pull at the chains, and though at first there’s nothing, then he closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they’re black. The chains’ color starts changing, going to a rusting orange that leaves Michael in awe, as he takes a step back, still holding his breath.

Geordie, the one responsible for the pause, shakes her head. Her voice sounds small and broken when she asks: “Is that what you’re doing? Draining witches dry so you can kill the majority of humans because they may or may not develop magick?”

“The alternative isn’t much better, love,” Ilana says, her tone almost lovingly. She floats closer to Geordie, and hesitating a little, she adds: “What the Order has in store for humans is worse--”

She stops. Luke’s wrists pull apart and the chains fall to their sides.

His eyes are full black as he pulls himself to his feet. His clothes are ragged and his skin is covered in bruises and dry blood. But still, with the red on his lips and teeth, he smirks. It’s maniac and out of control, and before Michael has a chance to stand up himself, Luke’s spreading both his hands. The adrenaline gives him enough to stand and ignore the pain, but not enough that his magick gets any more intense -- he pulls at the metal of Geordie’s gun, brings it to his hands like a magnet, but the spaces between his fingers tear and it bleeds. Luke doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t stop. In seconds he has the gun, the smile, and is shooting at Ilana.

Michael sinks his teeth to his bottom lip, but there isn’t any time to waste.

He doesn’t look back to see if Luke got her. Promptly ignoring the black licking down his neck from the injury in the back of his head, promptly ignoring how the whole room seems to vibrate along, he runs to the opposite side of the room. Though he’s closer to Ashton than Caleb, and has promised Dennis to bring Ashton back, Caleb’s the one closest, and no matter what, he’s taking the three of them out of here alive today.

From up-close, Caleb looks worse than Michael had imagined, and definitely worse than Luke. He’s chained to his feet, lying on the ground, his feet bare and bloodied, a piece of the chains cutting through his skin, all the area around it purple. There’s a piece of clothing wrapped tightly around where his arm ends, just below his elbow, but it’s stained red. He’s soaking in sweat, his eyes rolling back as if delirious even as he struggles to keep them open. He moves his mouth but Michael doesn’t have the time to try and decipher what he’s trying to say.

He looks over his shoulder fast, just to check if everyone he cares for is still okay. No, not okay. Odd choice of words. Nobody’s really okay. Nobody has been for years, maybe ever. He checks to see if they’re still breathing. They are.

It’s clear to see that what moves Geordie and what moves Luke are different things -- there’s the heaviness of hatred that makes Geordie’s moves sloppy and makes her miss every chance at causing Ilana any real danger, but Luke, maybe because of the modified adrenaline or maybe just because of who he is, has checked out. His eyes are rolled back and he keeps pushing at magick that won’t answer to him as intensely as he needs it to, bringing down nail by nail from the pieces of wood covering the windows, just to try and hit Ilana. Sometimes he gets it right, and she winces and yells and curses, and sometimes he doesn’t. The smile doesn’t leave his face either way.

Michael has no doubt he’s pissed and scared. But ultimately, he’s also having fun.

Michael doesn’t know what to make of that.

“Don’t…” Caleb manages, that one word seeming to take much of his energy.

Ignoring him, Michael takes the second syringe, and considers it lucky, that there will be one for each. Ilana yells something at Geordie, and Geordie calls out for Luke, but Michael doesn’t turn away, not now.

“Don’t do it,” Caleb begs, locking eyes with Michael for a second.

Michael sinks the syringe to his neck.

His hand grabs at the stones of the wall, and he cries out loudly, struggling to keep it together.

Michael takes a step back, frowning. Without Luke’s help, he isn’t sure how to get rid of the chains. He presses his lips together, trying to assess the situation as Caleb’s breathing slowly returns to normal, and then he feels a shiver up his spine.

Ilana is by his side, connecting her fist to his ear. His good ear. The one he relies on.

The world falls apart, and he falls to his knees.

Everything echoes, and his head hurts like hell.

Caleb snaps his eyes open, and tries to move closer to the wall. Michael forces his eyes open but it’s difficult. Every time he opens his eyes again, the world seems to be in a different color.

All black.

Luke yells but Michael can’t make out the words.

All white.

Geordie shoots and Luke shoots and Michael didn’t know there were this many guns.

Purple.

He falls next to Caleb on the ground and he wants to hug his knees close to his chest but he doesn’t.

Green.

A lightning cuts through the sky but the sky is inside the room. No one’s hit but everyone’s stunned.

Red.

Blood blood blood. Blood everywhere and Michael can’t keep his eyes open and can’t listen to a fucking thing in the world.

Blue.

Just the stone floor, and a persistent sound like a heart monitor going off.

Forcing his eyes to blink, he rolls to his side. There’s someone next to him but the person isn’t treating to his deafness or his shock or his unblinking eyes. It’s Jason, eyes red with crying but face dry from tears, just the freckles over his brown skin, no stain of blood, no nothing. There’s a smirk in the corner of his mouth as he holds Caleb’s face for just one second before he takes a knife shaped like a saw and starts working on Caleb’s chains.

Michael can’t watch Caleb’s expression.

He tries to steady his breath but it’s hard. He tries to keep his eyes open but they blurry.

Jack’s arms are around Luke and Luke’s crying hard. One of Jack’s hands is still blue with electricity, but he doesn’t let go. His eyes are screwed shut, and he doesn’t look like he’ll ever let Luke go.

Not far from them, Ilana’s standing between Geordie and Ashton. Her eyes are trained on Geordie and her lips move in a plea. Even without being able to hear the words, even with the white noise louder in his head, he can still make out the one word Ilana tells Geordie: “Please.”

Michael takes a deep breath, and tries to focus.

More images come into focus then, as his hearing slowly starts to return.

There’s more people. Way more people. There are maybe ten guards and they’re all wearing clothes that cover up to their necks or half of their faces, and they’re blocking the way out. Most of them don’t have guns, but a few do.

Jack and Luke’s hug is a hug of goodbye.

Jason’s getting Caleb free for a goodbye as well.

Michael’s sense of world is slowly returning and he’s about to say goodbye to it soon.

He sets his jaw, still sitting, dizzy.

Geordie shakes her head. She’s still crying. “Ilana, stop,” she pleads, but her voice is small.

Ilana ignores what she says and makes a plea of her own: “Please, Geordie. I don’t have Diana anymore. I need you.”

Michael forces himself to stand. His ankle, where the woman with the sword had cut, still throbs with pain when he stands. His head aches and his hearing hasn’t returned completely yet. It makes him rely more on his still blurring sight, on his breathing, on the smell of pain and blood.

He takes a tentative step forward, still feeling his legs and how they’ll react to him. The dehydration suddenly hits him; how long it’s been since he’s last drunk water, since he’s last eaten properly. With his mind racing and too much to pay attention to, his mind goes back to Daryl, and the kiss he left on his father’s forehead that might as well have been goodbye. The last look he and Karen exchanged, and how the chain reaction that followed couldn’t have been stopped if they’d hugged or if she’d kissed his face, but he still wishes that had happened.

The box isn’t his anymore, but Jason’s. He catches Caleb gasping for air as Jason sinks the syringe of modified adrenaline to his neck, and Caleb clings to Jason with his arm, his ankles free of the chains, fallen to the cold stone ground.

Michael tries to blink away the blurriness, but it’s hard. Guards are closing in on them, and to Geordie and Ilana, it doesn’t make a difference. Jason stands up and runs to meet the closest guard with a the saw-like knife on his hands. Caleb’s on his feet faster than Michael had expected, but he doesn’t look well enough to fight. Luke and Jack are back-to-back, a perfect team of two, their eyes rolled back in pure fluid black, Jack’s expression serious enough that it balances Luke’s smirk.

Geordie holds her shoulder, staring at Ilana, and electricity breaks the window as it invades the room, a man goes down but someone throws a knife in Luke’s direction, and it catches the side of his arm. He swears and they’re both at him, but Geordie still just holds her shoulder and stares at Ilana. They’re talking, or trying to, with Ilana raising her eyebrows and floating a few inches above the ground, and Geordie’s expression turning more pained and bitter by the second.

Michael’s mind won’t catch up with the urgency. He’s entering a gymnasium in his head all over again. He looks at Ashton, on the ground, struggling to keep his eyes open but they keep fluttering shut again. His chest is barely moving, and it occurs to Michael, as he looks at the box by Caleb’s feet, that there’s one more dose of modified adrenaline left.

He takes a deep breath.

Someone screams close to him -- it’s Jack. He winces and closes his eyes, and tries to look away. He focuses on what he can. He ignores the voices in his head and outside of it, the screams that he can barely make sense of, and though it hurts to walk, it hurts to breathe, it hurts to be, he puts one foot in front of the other, and takes the box to Ashton.

Ilana’s back is to him, and she’s focused on Geordie enough that he thinks maybe it won’t matter. Maybe they’ll have a fighting chance. Maybe Geordie isn’t as hurt as she looks, maybe she doesn’t feel like dying, maybe she hasn’t given up yet. Maybe the betrayal didn’t reach quite that deep, and she’s just buying them all time.

He kneels next to Ashton, holding his breath.

There are tubes coming out of Ashton's nose, one out of his mouth but as it hangs open, it was already yanked from it. His head is lolled to the side, his eyelids heavy but eyes still open in spite of the fight for consciousness clearly wearing him out. He's drooling a little, no control over his numb weak body, wrists as bloody and cut as deep as Luke's had been just above his head. He locks eyes with Michael, and Michael holds his breath, looking away from the hunger and thirst that goes way beyond food and water, and his eyes trail off on Ashton's pale veins, and the butterfly needles that come out of his veins.

His hearing is flaky, and he'd be a fool to completely rely on it. That much, their so-called-plan to rescue Luke and whoever was left and Michael's hearing have in common.

After Neena all but unpredictable betrayal, there wasn't much of a chance to start with. Now he's got echoes of Geordie and Ilana arguing with each other, Geordie's eyes red with angry crying and Ilana's back to him, and a battlefield made of the wide room. The sounds of fighting -- grunts, screams, gasps -- fill the room and make it vibrate through Michael's body. He doesn't hear it as much as he feels it, and that should've been enough to tip him on what to do next, but he holds back.

He's going to need his magick very soon.

Michael holds his breath and tries to steady his thumping heart.

His hands are shaking but he still holds the syringe firmly in his right hand. His good ear seems to vibrate along with the room, indecisive on whether to allow his hearing or not. He has to focus to zone out the noises and all the constant threat around him, and he gives Ashton a short nod that he hopes says: we've got this.

Have they? Michael hopes they have.

Michael presses his lips together in a thin line, and holds his breath. His heart is thumping and he can’t follow it -- can’t follow his heart, can’t follow his guts, can’t follow anything, because if he focuses on anything that isn’t his hand on the syringe, he’ll listen to the screaming, the grunts, the sounds of war that will never truly leave him even years after he leaves this place.

Or months or weeks or days. He doesn’t know how long he’s got. All he knows is he survives today, because if he hadn’t, Cameron wouldn’t have seen him walking the people of Death Valley out of their hole on earth.

Through the shaking of his hands and the aching of his bones, he raises the syringe to meet Ashton’s skin, and Ashton’s eyes lock with his one more time before they grow wider. He sees it before he hears it. In fact, he’s not entirely sure he ever hears it at all -- the piercing scream that cuts him in half. He turns immediately, his head snapping up, to the voice he’s always followed, even when he didn’t follow his heart or his guts or anything else.

Luke’s voice. Screaming.

He’s inside a gymnasium and everything echoes. Luke’s voice, screaming no, yelling in desperation, a sound as ugly as it is unforgettable. He’s inside an ample room of whiteness, and everything shines but not in a beautiful way. Luke’s voice echoes and the expression on his bloodied face makes it hard to look away and assess the damage, the situation, everything that’s happening at once, all the split seconds where he’s decided he needed to rescue Ashton making up for the hours of apprehension. There’s no apprehension now, just widened eyes and panic. 

He’s inside his own head, and there’s no sound and there’s no sight, and all he knows is that today is the day they fall. It may be that he won’t die, and maybe Luke won’t die, and maybe most of them won’t, and if they’re very, very lucky, maybe they’re all going to live. But they’ll fall. They’ll fall beyond doubt.

There are four people around Luke, and Luke’s on his knees. One of them has his knee connecting to Luke’s face, the other has a huge cane that’s pressed against the space between Luke’s shoulder blades. And yet that’s not why he’s screaming. Too far to Luke and the guards around him is Jack, and his body is convulsing. There’s still electricity running through his hands, his arms, his chest, and it’s enough to keep the humans around him wary and not touch him. But he’s not alright. He’s not okay. Michael doesn’t need to have been looking before to know what happened: Jack must’ve called in the electricity, but his body lost control and shocked him instead. He can’t conduct what he can’t control.

Jason pulls the trigger at someone who’s got an arm around Caleb’s neck in an armlock, and Michael thinks, in retrospect, that this isn’t what it had looked like, when Caleb did the same to Jack months ago. It was disgusting provocation, but provocation all the same. This time, it’s far too aggressive and desperate to be anything but blatantly violent: the man’s choking Caleb, and Jason’s shooting at him, at them, at anything that will stop it. Michael holds his breath and hopes for the best, but with the three people reaching for Jason, with the two women close to secure Caleb even if the man with him gets shot, Michael doesn’t look at them for time enough to check if Jason’s bullet ever arrived anywhere.

It’s only a split second. 

A bad-timed assessment of how fast they’ll reach the ground when they fall. Very bad-timed.

Geordie, who was arguing viciously with Ilana, has her eyes red with tears, her face swollen and damp. But she isn’t staring ahead anymore. She’s raising her rifle, just not shooting at Ilana. She turns around, and with her injured shoulder down in an angle that can’t be right, she empties her gun at the people reaching for Jason.

Michael hopes every bullet counts, and they’re all dead.

He doesn’t know. Before he can think to look at it, Ilana’s body disintegrates, and appears again closer to him. Too close, and yet she doesn’t touch him. It’s the syringe. A split second, and it’s gone. She slaps it to the floor and Ashton’s grunt is the only thing he hears, before he hears everything. 

Luke’s screaming is clear now, his sobs of please and I can stop it and just let me help him, as Jack’s body collapsed on the floor keeps coming back to life and letting it go again. Michael hears the sounds of weapons, the back of a gun and a cane and the end of a sword, all hitting against bone -- Jack’s to make his body stop the revolting disturbing conflict with itself, Luke’s to stop him from crying so loudly, so impossible to stop. Michael hears more gunfire, Geordie’s groans and her rifle connecting to someone’s jaw. Caleb’s sole scream and then he wills himself into disappearing, and humans are shouting to each other to find the boy with the rings of blood around his ankles. The sounds are everything, everywhere, too overwhelming and too much.

Michael hears his own breath, the rhythm too fast, his chest going up and down with no control, his shaking hands making his whole body shake. Ashton’s deepening frown and though his lips don’t part again, Michael hears the sound that comes from his heart: _You blew it._

Every single thing. With his good ear, he hears everything.

On the floor, just next to Ashton’s body, the purple liquid of the syringe pools. Their last dose of modified adrenaline, and Ashton’s shot at having enough strength to get out of there. Ruined.

Michael’s blown it. 

Ilana’s eyes are wide, and they’re not flickering anymore. They’re solid brown, looking so human that Michael has to hold his breath. Her eyes are wet, too, face damp with the crying from pleading Geordie to reconsider whatever she thought Geordie needed reconsidering. The queen, as they call her, and she certainly looks royal enough, with the rage in her eyes and the yellow of her teeth, her round face and air that seems to float against gravity like the rest of her graining floating impossible body. 

“You silly boy. No amount of adrenaline is going to get them out of here. They’re mine, and now so are you,” she pauses, her face coming just inches away from Michael, so close that his body freezes, unable to stand up and take a step back, unable to breathe or speak or do anything at all. He thinks, then, that this is what it must’ve felt like before she got inside his head and erased the memory of ever meeting her. “The girl wants your magick,” she muses, raising her eyebrows, “wants to speak with the trees and the wind. Thinks that’s what’s going to make her stronger. But she got her prize. She brought you here. It’s only fair that she gets to choose what magick she gets, isn’t it?”

“Neena,” Michael breathes out, as if a whole chunk of life leaves him at breathing out that one word. Blankness passes over Ilana’s eyes, like the name means nothing to her, and he figures it can’t possibly; not when they’re all pawns in her game. “She’s just a kid.”

Ilana tilts her head to the side, her face coming even closer to Michael’s, her body afloat. “One who brought you to slaughter.”

Michael shakes his head, and forces himself to take a step back, even if it means crawling away, anything to put some distance between him and Ilana. He tries to ignore the sound of Luke’s insistent crying, of Jack’s body still hitting the ground of stone, of Jason and Geordie fighting with the humans around them, and Caleb’s silence. 

“I knew it was coming. But we needed to get here, we needed to find our people. If it meant a girl got anything from it, then alright, I can live with that.”

Ilana’s eyes slit in disbelief. “You knew she’d betray you? And you still didn’t kill her?”

Michael sets his jaw, quiet.

Ilana snorts, staring at him. “Then you’re a lot more foolish than I thought you were.”

Michael parts his lips to talk, but the argument dies in his throat. It’s another scream, loud and intense enough that it makes something drain out of Ilana’s eyes. She turns abruptly, Geordie’s voice still echoing, and then she isn’t in Michael’s face anymore.

She disappears, and once she does, Michael can see what’s happened. He reluctantly pulls himself to his feet, giving Ashton one last apologetic look and trying to swallow back the guilt and the struggle on where to turn. It hurts to stand, his cut ankle making him wince aloud, but though he’s had no shot of adrenaline, the one produced by his body is enough to keep him standing.

Geordie has her free hand pressed to her already injured shoulder, and a scream in her throat that seems to never end. In front of her is a man just a little taller than her, with a knife thrust right onto her injury. She bends over, fighting to keep her balance, and Ilana washes over them like a hurricane. She grabs the knife of one of the men around Jack, and slits the throat of the man who hurt Geordie.

He falls to his knees, and every noise in the room seems to stop at once. 

Jack coughs and thrusts his head back against the ground, but even Luke stops screaming, in shock. Geordie looks at Ilana, frowning, but the pain still seems to be too much for her to speak. Ilana lets her body solidify next to her, and touches Geordie’s good shoulder delicately, like it’s her own daughter there.

“Nobody touches her,” she says, raising her voice. “I’ll personally see it that anyone who harms this girl dies immediately.” 

Nobody speaks. Nobody seems to even breathe.

And then Jason does, snorting loudly and walking towards her with his eyes narrowed. “How dare you pretend like you care? I saw my grandpa downstairs. You were _friends_ , and then you--”

“And then, Jason,” she raises her eyebrows, her arm going around Geordie’s shoulders protectively, in spite of Geordie wincing away from her, and not being strong enough to push her away. “I tried to make him stronger. I tried to save him from himself. It’s not my fault he wasn’t strong enough to make it.”

“I saw him die!” he yells, and his voice echoes through the room and Michael’s head. “Let go of Geordie. You don’t get to touch her.”

She takes a deep breath, and Geordie cries out, struggling in her embrace. “You know Diana loved her, didn’t you? Diana told you. She trusted you so much, and yet… Yet you didn’t do anything when Daryl assigned her and Halsey to go on that mission to rescue Daryl’s son. You knew what would happen. You knew Geordie had feelings for Halsey, Jason, and you didn’t even try to step up and be in that mission instead.”

Geordie spits blood on the floor.

Jason stares at Ilana, frowning.

“You blame me for Geordie and Diana not _dating_? Are you serious?!” Ilana doesn’t answer, and Jason spits blood too, but just to spite Ilana. “You’re delusional. Diana would be so ashamed of what her mother’s become. I know I am for what the leader of my people became.”

Ilana narrows her eyes, ready to snap.

But she doesn’t. Not really.

Next to Michael, he catches only the desperate movements before it’s too late. He never saw Caleb, invisible and quiet, but he should’ve seen it when Caleb took one of the doses of Opia from the box, still on the floor. He should’ve caught it when Caleb held one of Ashton’s eyes open, and dropped the liquid on it.

Ashton screams like it burns, struggles in Caleb’s embrace, and everyone looks, but it’s too late to stop Caleb, even if he’s visible now. It’s too late to stop Ashton, too.

Ashton heaves violently, staring up, with his eyes widened, and his eyes turn all black. His face changes, too fast, faster than any transformation Michael’s seen in his life. His nose seems to break upward, his jaw splitting open, and he roars, loud enough that a shiver goes down Michael’s spine and makes him take a step back.

Thick black fur erupts from his skin until it covers him, and his wrists are no longer chained, because they aren’t wrists at all. They’ve become paws, enormous and steel-strong and strong enough to break the metal. He roars a second time, and this time, his whole body launches forward, ripping both ragged pieces of clothing and skin. He’s an angry black-eyed panther, brutal and heavy and running fast towards Ilana.

She disappears, leaving Geordie falling to her knees, but Ashton isn’t done. He roars louder, jumps on the next person, a tall woman holding a cane to Luke’s neck, and sinks his teeth to her face, ripping it apart before Michael can look away, showering Luke in blood.

Michael turns to Caleb, holding his breath.

Caleb throws the box and its remaining two Opia doses to Michael, and Michael catches it in his hands. “Fight,” he says, and then disappears once more.

Michael swallows back his drumming heart, holding the small box in one of his hands, and closing his eyes, willing them to roll back. 

When he opens his eyes again, he can feel the heartbeat of every person in the room.


	44. the first of the gang to die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> long time no see!!!!! it's been a busy couple of weeks, but i'm happy to finally be able to update opia! still replying some of the wonderful comments in the last chapter, but just know from the bottom fo my heart that each comment means the world, and i feel extremely honored that you guys are still on board with this story. i truly do love you. thank you so much. 
> 
> well! without further ado, here's chapter 44! hope you guys enjoy it!

The TV is loud, an old cartoon about an Order witch that can levitate a few inches from the ground and decides that she can fly. It was a hit about ten years ago, before special effects were better, and when Michael’s generation still believed in miracles, like being able to fly just because you can control air enough to levitate a few inches. Michael used to watch the show with wide eyes, looking at the girl not much older than he was at the time, controlling her magick and making it bend and nearly break all for her most foolish desires: for flying. Not out of thirst for power or to spy on enemies, but for the sole reason that she wanted to see the world from above.

In a way, everybody wants to see the world from above. The girl from the cartoon found a way, that’s all.

But that was several years ago, and after just a few of those -- years in which he grew more and more bitter as reality set in, and he knew with an acute sense of guilt exactly who he was and who he’d never be able to be -- Michael didn’t wish to have that type of power anymore.

Manipulating magick in such way, elevating it and expanding it, making it so overwhelmingly powerful… it seemed exhausting. The girl kept on flying even though she had no wings, controlling air like it was something tangible and perhaps to those people that can control it, it is. But Michael doesn’t wish for it anymore. Michael isn’t sure what could come of elevating and expanding his awareness of his surroundings, but he does know that only one thing could come of matter manipulation, and that was destruction.

“You still up?” Calum asks, surprising him.

He doesn’t turn around, waits for Calum to walk around the couch and sit next to him instead. Once he’s sitting there, Michael just shrugs, and that seems to be enough for a while. Calum pulls his legs up to sit cross-legged, and when Michael looks at him, he thinks that Calum looks like a ghost. His skin is a ghostly blue from the television light, and it’s a little unnerving that even the ghost of him looks worryingly charming. Mostly charming, but also worried.

“What is it?” Michael says quietly, in a way of stating instead of asking. 

Calum sighs heavily and stares at the girl on TV, now just a child to them, even her cartoon form more plausible than the words that come next: “I think I’m in love,” he starts, and his pause is long. Michael feels something sink in his stomach because he knows that’s not the face people wear when they’re confessing their love for you, and also because he knows who Calum’s in love with, and has known pretty much since that first day when Maddy stopped in front of them with an eyebrow raised and her wild red hair. Michael presses his lips together and looks back at the TV, and waits for Calum to continue. Eventually, he does. “Do you -- shit, Michael,” he laughs, forcedly and out of his nose, and runs a hand over his hair. “You know what I’m talking about?”

Again, Michael shrugs. 

The girl on TV is flying higher than Michael’s ever seen anyone fly, and though she’s a cartoon and one that he only paid attention to a solid five years ago, he still feels as if he needs to reach out for her hand and let her take him away. Maybe there is such thing as a way to enhance magick, and she can be a real person and enhance hers, and Michael won’t have to listen to the boy he’s in love with, asking him if he knows what love’s all about.

Calum insists: “How could I even describe it?!”

He giggles, as if the whole notion of trying to describe it is as absurd as the need to try anyway. Michael turns to him slowly, because it hurts and also because it makes his muscles sore. Truth is, he’s been awake all night, turning from one side to the other. The truth -- the real truth, and not the one he tells himself that day -- is that he’s been feeling it again, his Chaos magick licking at his limbs and trying to invade his bloodstream, just like a disease that could kill you in ten minutes. Like poison. But what he’ll tell himself is that he’s lovesick. Sometimes that does feel like poison.

“I think,” Calum starts over, looking back at the girl on the screen, now landing on the roof of her best friend’s house. “I think it’s like knowing, just knowing in your heart, that it’s worth dying for.”

Michael snorts.

Then he looks back at the TV. 

He wishes there was a way to enhance magick and then steal Calum’s magick to himself, and heal not physical things but his own heart.

* * *

Michael’s sure he’d been wrong about two things when he was younger: he was wrong about magick and the girl in the cartoon, and he was wrong about love. He knows now what he didn’t then: that the girl must’ve been miserable and animal, brutal and out of her element, because it wasn’t just that her magick was stronger because she was special. They were feeding all children of Michael’s generation a lie: that girl, in that cartoon, must’ve been on fucking steroids or something.

The enormous black panther that has become of Ashton roars and collides against bodies, one at a time, sometimes two, moving fast and brutally and leaving bodies in its wake. More guards come, and everyone with guns shoots at him. Some bullets might make it, but Ashton doesn’t stop. He’s got a hunger nobody can soothe, not food not water not comfort and definitely not love. It’s about losing control.

The second thing Michael had been wrong about -- love -- was that he didn’t quite buy what Calum had said, that love is something worth dying for, and he supposes that means Calum was even smarter than Michael than he’d anticipated. 

Love, not being _in_ love, is stronger than being alive.

Michael knows, without a doubt, that he loves Luke. But also that he loves Geordie, Jason, Jack, Ashton and Caleb. He loves his people, not because he’s in love with them, but because he needs them alive, and that need is enough that he knows he’d die for them. Knowing that he won’t, that the prophecy Cameron’s been shown ensures that, is only a small detail, because he knows in his heart that if it comes to it, he’ll die for them, because he loves them. Because he needs to make sure they’re alive. 

He takes a deep, deep breath.

And lets the fire in his heart burn him whole.

Through the void he sees the molecules of everyone in the room. It takes a second to quieten his mind, try and separate who he wants from whom he does not want to reach. The second stretches and expands and engulfs him. It takes too long, it’s too painful a process -- he feels everything so much more acutely. That means the cut on his ankle brings unbearable pain, that his head aches and his good ear still echoes from getting hit by Ilana. His body is a carcass and one that isn’t doing its job very well.

But there’s more than just that.

He feels, so intensified that there’s no room in his head or heart to feel anything else, the vibrations that come from Ashton and his drugged body and soul. He feels the hunger and the thirst and with the most animalistic instincts comes as well the fierce not-letting-go-ness. 

And he makes a pact with himself: that he won’t let go, won’t back down, won’t give up.

He couldn’t see Caleb if he tried, but he feels him. He’s running as much as his sore bloodied feet will take him, and he stops right behind one of the three men closing in on Jason. He kicks the man’s back messily; it doesn’t work as well as it should, like Caleb isn’t ready yet to behave in his own skin after the explosion and being chained up for so long, but he’s doing his best. Jason seems to naturally feel his presence without having to see, so he plays along, and punches and thrusts his knife and never once hits Caleb. Michael doesn’t sense any fear from Caleb at all.

He’s the only one. Everyone else vibrates with fear, their souls becoming one, humans and witches and assassins and bounty hunters and everyone really. United by their terror, and that doesn’t make a difference. Geordie’s shoulder seems to have officially put her arm down to uselessness, but her other hand is raised and her rifle shoots at everyone she sees, at every guard that tries to get closer to her without hurting her. Her aim is poor, and she’s breathing fast with panic. Luke’s let go of any pretentious of sounding put together, too. He’s panting and crying and sobbing so hard his chest shakes, begging them to let go of Jack, to let him come to his brother’s rescue, make him stop shaking. Jack’s not convulsing anymore, but he looks a mix between awake and asleep, alive and dead, here and there. Only one woman is guarding Luke now, but she has her gun pressed to Luke’s forehead, even as he screams at her for help.

Ashton is everywhere, and he’s nowhere.

He’s reaching for throats and faces and in a matter of seconds there’s already so much blood on his fur that he’s become dark red instead of black. Ilana’s vanished for the time-being, and her absence comes with the presence of even more guards. Ashton goes for the newcomers instead of helping the ones keeping and cornering his friends.

Michael doesn’t know if there’s any logic to the decision. Maybe he’s just too thirsty for blood to care.

He takes a deep breath, raising his hand high and focusing all his energy on the man bringing his foot down against Jack’s chest. He can feel the man’s heartbeat along his own, like they’re one. When he inhales, more sharply this time, he smells blood. So much blood. He wraps his fingers around thin air, and hears faintly the man choking.

Michael holds his breath and hopes he’ll never have to exhale again.

He snaps his hand down, and blinks his eyes back. The man’s body falls to the stone ground with a broken neck, and Michael looks down at his feet. There’s blood everywhere. Soaking his boots, and now the man’s clothes. 

Michael presses his lips together and lets Caleb’s advice echo in his head: _Fight._

Though that one man falls, there’s more. Though bodies keep on falling, new ones keep on rising from the ashes -- not exactly, not from the ashes, nothing mystical about Ilana’s never-ending army finding their way up the stairs. But it’s what it feels like: like they can’t stay down, like they refuse to die. Michael grits his teeth and rolls his eyes back again. He hears the heartbeats of everyone in the room, and can’t make out whose are the ones he roots keeps on beating and the ones he wishes his will alone could stop.

Michael feeds on Ashton’s brutality and thirst. Like Ashton, he lets himself be blinded by the hunger that will never wear off, by the sense of revenge so overwhelming that it can only come from abuse. It’s not his, not even chemically his, but he’ll pretend it’s enough to give him strength.

Seeing every color and every corner and edge and everything that’s wrong with the scene he’s found himself in, he dodges kicks and punches and lets bullets and his friends’ fists take care of it for now. He goes straight for the man holding Luke in place, and only when Luke’s head snaps back as he screams with his jaw dropped, that Michael realizes he’s inside a gymnasium again.

Everything echoes and everything’s so damn distant.

Sounds are a luxury that brutality takes away from him. Serves him right.

Blinking his eyes back, he doesn’t stop marching on. With the man’s beating heart beating along his own, he brings both of his hands to his own chest, and feeling a scream come out of his throat without ever listening to it, his nails sink into the fabric of his shirt, into his skin, into his core. He rips his own heart out with his own hands, squeezes it until it falls apart in his own right hand, but it isn’t he who falls. It’s the man, bringing both of his hands to his chest, falling to his knees, screaming in terror.

His shirt is a rag but his skin is only red from the scratches. His skin never tears and his heart never stops beating.

And yet Michael still doesn’t listen to his voice. His horror registers in Michael’s DNA as if to never leave his being -- he lets it sink in, but doesn’t stop. He lets it sink in and accepts full responsibility but still doesn’t think twice. He kneels down in front of Luke, touching his shoulder to force him to look back at Michael in the eye, and only then he blinks his eyes back.

He doesn’t listen to his own voice either, but he means to says: “Jack.” 

Luke nods, but when he stands up he’s limping. Michael turns around, turning his eyes back to galaxy, black and white at once, one color getting mixed with the other, his own two magicks losing themselves where one starts and the other ends. 

Out of the corner of his eye he catches glimpses: Luke kissing his knuckles and punching Jack in the face. He’d snort, make an unnecessary comment, but they’re not close and either way, it’s effective: gets Jack to stop looking like he’ll die, and now he just looks like he’s sleeping, chest back to more or less normal, still shining in sweat and pain and blood, but no more electricity.

Outside it still rains. The storm is still on a high.

Geordie’s out of bullets and punches someone straight in the jaw. Michael knows because he’s standing right next to this someone, but he doesn’t turn back to her, doesn’t look her in the eye, doesn’t ask if she needs assistance. He can feel Caleb close to her, cornering slow but invisible closer to Geordie’s most eminent enemies.

Ashton, panther and drugged and unstoppable Ashton, has jumped on a woman who was fighting Jason. She’s dead, but he doesn’t stop. She’s dead, but he feeds off her life and her face and everyone’s wariness and fear.

In a way, Michael feeds off the same, even if vicariously through Ashton.

Michael frowns as he moves his fingers, because he finds that he can’t -- he knows Ilana’s in the room, but he can’t connect to her, can’t find her heartbeat, can’t track down her breath. She’s invisible but not like Caleb is. She’s invisible in a way that he can see her just above them all, but she’s still unreachable. The perfect enemy: the one he can’t kill.

It fuels enough that he thinks he may not need to think this comes from Ashton anymore.

Though he knows it was the Order who took Annika and Nathan, both of whom he never met but meant something to the people that mean something to him, it fuels him. Though he knows it was Karen who sent the shapeshifter as Nathan and with that made him lose his hearing, made him lose his boyfriend, made him lose his friends and all hope that he had a second chance at living and connecting with Daryl, it fuels him. Though he knows that, logically, Ilana has nothing to do with the death of the baby brother he never met and the fact that he’s very likely going to die without meeting Scarlet, still it fuels him. Though it’s been mostly Karen and Daryl from day one, to either deny him the other parent or the other world, it fuels him, because it’s easier to blame Ilana than to blame what he can’t reach, what he can’t kill.

She’s the perfect enemy, because she’s there to hurt.

Michael’s going to.

His eyes turned, he raises both of his hands. 

The noises have all quietened down, but somehow he can still hear something inside his head. It’s not the noise of fights and it’s not his own heartbeat. It’s the sound of bones, he thinks, the rattling sound that will never leave him alone even if he tries. It’s the body count that never stopped, and will never stop, to the day he dies he knows it won’t ever ever stop. It’s the sound of bones, and he couldn’t put it any other way. He listens to the bones and stares up at the ceiling, but he only sees the molecules around it, the void and the nothing, and everyone is there. Everyone’s energy is flying up because everyone’s energy is leaving them. Everyone’s dying tonight. His enemies, his friends, no one will get out of this alive, even if they walk. There’s no going back from being bathed in blood this badly.

There are two things vital to what he’s doing next. One is that he trusts his people to protect him now, to shoot and hurt and kill and bright down anyone who dares come his way. The second thing is that he must trust himself. That’s the hardest part.

Michael breathes in, and spreads his arms wide.

With his chin tilted up, he welcomes Chaos.

It burns hotter and brighter and eats him up. It’s already in him but it still seems to come from within with that much more force. It licks his whole body until he’s made of his own magick a shield, not to protect but to channel. He’ll be a vessel for destruction if it means they get out alive. He’ll be a vessel for death if it means Ilana goes down, and with her, her army. He’ll be a vessel for pain if it means there’ll be no more magick drugs and no more people chained up, humans being forced into magick or witches being drained out of it. 

He’ll be a vessel for all the Chaos that resides in him. Just like Karen always feared the most, and like Daryl never dared to suggest he did.

Michael screams, because it’s too much, and it hurts his bones -- the same bones he listens, the same bones that will never leave him until he leaves life. He listens to his bones and it’s as if they all break. 

Not break. They bend. They bend for him, and then everything is ecstatic.

Everything burns, from his skin to his eyes to his throat, but he still keeps breathing on fire because suddenly everything is so much clearer. It’s as if the world slows down, and it isn’t that, that’s not his magick, but he’s focused enough that he feels as if that could be it. 

He sees everything. He feels everything. And he can take his pick on who or what to connect to.

Head tilting back, he finds it. He finds her.

He wraps his hand around nothing, and brings nothing down strongly.

Ilana comes out of her hiding spot, her body collapsing forcefully on the ground. She struggles to stand up, and Michael struggles to keep breathing fire, but he does. He breathes fire and spits Chaos, because he’s a vessel and vessels are hollow containers. He’s hollow. All he is, is magick. 

He screams at her, the grip of his hand growing tighter.

Sounds are back, but he’s got tunnel vision. He’s staring at her, on the floor, hands going to her throat as she chokes, and all he can think of is that he hates that she doesn’t make a sound. He screams again, and he hears the crying in his own voice, but he stands his ground. Vessels are hollow and hollowness doesn’t allow any room for weakness.

It’s not breaking. But it’s almost that.

She stares at him and tilts her chin up. She’s choking for air, hands scratching her neck as he cuts her air supply by crushing her larynx. He wants to make her voiceless so she’ll never say a single word. So she’ll never seduce girls like Neena into believing they should be something else. So she’ll never betray her friends and her people and--

He stops.

He blinks his eyes back to green.

“Did Daryl know?” he asks.

His voice is loud and firm, but it still makes her cock her head to the side, as if she’s going to ask him to repeat the question. He doesn’t. He doesn’t move his hand, either, as if his green eyes could do much now, as if they were ever to do anything. 

The world doesn’t stop this time. 

Truth is: nothing ever does.

Ilana smirks, hands massaging her throat.

Her voice sounds a little raspy when she says: “What do you think, Prince?”

Michael knows he must be breathing, but it doesn’t feel like it.

It’s not a panic attack. It’s a nothing attack. It’s paralyzing but he doesn’t feel horror. If anything, it’s numbing. He stares at Ilana and watches her stand up, and can’t bring himself to do anything at all. He’s a vessel but the source isn’t powerful enough. He’s hollow but he’s leaking. There’s a woman with her arm around his neck bringing him down brutally, and all he thinks as he holds her arm back, is that he can’t keep up.

Geordie screams first, and then comes Ashton, groaning fast in Ilana’s direction, but she just floats up again, as if Michael bringing her down was a small obstacle to her grand finale. Just one rock in the way, but she’s still shining.

The woman’s chokehold makes him feel air-headed, but maybe he’s just giving up.

“Restrain your animal,” Ilana says, cooly. “Or I’ll kill the Prince here and now.”

“You can’t! You promised me his magick.”

Neena. She’s there. Michael can’t look around, but she’s there.

Michael closes his eyes.

Defeat, defeat, defeat. He wonders how much more he can lose if he just keeps going.

Geordie screams again, but she’s yelling something. Michael forces his eyes open, but his hands are busy trying to get the woman off him, and there’s no one coming to his rescue, because he was supposed to be the rescue. No one to save the saviors. No one to fool them into thinking they were any good at saving themselves.

“Look, we’re just killing each other,” Geordie says, above any moan of pain, any growl of rebellion. Michael’s facing Ilana and beyond her is just the walls. He watches Ilana’s expression soften at Geordie’s voice, even if she sounds like she’d rather be tearing Ilana apart. “I have a proposition.”

No. 

No.

No.

Ilana smiles fondly. “You do?”

“Yeah,” Geordie says, and sighs heavily. No one else speaks a word this time, so her voice doesn’t have to be that high. “Let them go. Let them all go. And I’ll stay.”

Ilana’s face lights up.

Jason yells no and someone holds him back.

Michael tries to blink away the heaviness that having no air can bring.

There’s no despair this time. He wonders if the woman choking him is using any magick at all.

“They don’t have a car, so you have to give them one. I know you have them, because Neena snitched. So here’s the thing: you give a good and big enough car to get them away from here,” she pauses. Her voice is heavy and strong, but she’s choking up. “Luke, Ashton, Caleb, that you took, and also the ones that came with me. Jason, Jack, and Michael. They all get to leave in one piece.”

Ilana frowns, looking confused.

“But, Geordie,” she says, as if that’s it.

Still she lowers her hand to the woman in front of her holding Michael, and when the woman lets go, Michael falls to his knees. He breathes in and out heavily, puts an effort into turning away and looking at Geordie, her words only now catching up to him. He shakes his head, mouths that no, she can’t, she won’t, she doesn’t have to, but he can’t speak just yet; his throat feels clogged with blood that isn’t even his.

Heaving and on all fours on the floor and spitting blood, he sees them all.

Luke’s by Jack’s side, and though Jack’s still unconscious, Luke’s clinging to him as if Jack can either protect him or save himself alone. Ashton’s standing close-by, all made of red fur and teeth, his eyes bottomless and all-white. Caleb’s visible, but he looks as if he’s too hurt to move. Jason’s the only one trying to get to Geordie, but she’s pointing a gun at him so he stays away.

Michael tries swallowing the lump in his throat, but only tastes more blood.

Perhaps some of it is his.

“Don’t, please,” Jason says, and his voice is far away. 

No, no, no. Not the gymnasium and the echoes and _no_.

His senses don’t follow up with what he needs. Jason argues and Geordie just shakes her head and points the gun more emphatically at him. Michael can still listen, but so very little.

Geordie speaks again, her tone louder and firmer than before: “They go, and I’ll stay. You wanted this for Diana, and I’m the closest you’ll get of her. Jason won’t do. You know she never loved him that way, don’t you? The way she loved me,” she raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t even have to sound persuasive. Ilana’s already grinning. “But you’ll let them leave. If I as much as see you give any instruction to any of your bounty hunters, I’ll shoot myself in the head, Ilana, I promise I will.”

Ilana grimaces. Jason looks like he’s going to shoot Geordie himself.

“I can’t lose you too.”

Someone says. Ilana or Jason. Michael doesn’t know. Michael’s still staring at Geordie, in shock.

Geordie ignores them both, and meets Michael’s eyes.

“Will they be okay again?” she asks Ilana. 

Ilana’s voice is impatient, like this is irrelevant. “Yes, yes, yes. All the drugs and torture were entirely experimental, and are probably out of their system by now. In a few hours they’ll be as good as new,” she claps her hands together. Ashton sneers. “So you’ll stay?”

Geordie looks at Michael again, and he sees her eyes well up.

She’s frowning. Michael thinks it’s to keep a straight face. The arm that isn’t holding the gun must be ruined. Michael sits on his legs, still breathing hard, and shakes his head no. He mouths to her: “Don’t do this.”

She looks away, back at Ilana. “You don’t have any scientists,” she starts, “but you’re still trying to recreate the drugs. Even if Daryl helped you letting you harvest witches after the explosion, that still doesn’t help with the chemistry of it. Jack was the only one who knew how to make drugs in Death Valley. Are you working with Order too, Ilana?”

Ilana just smiles, lifting her shoulders.

“I’m working with anyone who’s interested in building a brand new world.”

Geordie winces.

Michael tries to move in her direction, but Jason is far closer and also faster. He tries to hold her, but she only pushes him away. It’s her arm, ignored for too long. She takes a deep breath, her eyes filled with tears, but her chin up in bravery. She moves towards the nearest wall, and then the gun isn’t pointed at Jason anymore. She points it to her own forehead.

“Give them directions to get a car. Not a single word to anyone of your bounty hunters until they’re at least an hour away.”

Walking past all of the guards that seem frozen, waiting for Ilana’s orders, walking past Neena and her fierce eyes, he stops next to Jason. Jason points at Geordie, and yells in Michael’s face. “Do something!” he says.

But Michael doesn’t.

He keeps on staring at Geordie, as she stares at Ilana.

She’s crying now. But Ilana’s smiling.

“We’ll put your arm back together, and give you only the most beautiful magick we have in store,” she says, voice made of sweetness. Michael can barely listen. His hearing comes and goes and he thinks Luke says something, thinks Caleb is yelling at him too, and Ashton’s still in attack mode. 

Michael doesn’t look away from her.

“Don’t let us die,” Geordie tells Michael.

Us. _Them_. Humans.

Michael nods.

Jason screams and Caleb’s suddenly holding him back with his one good arm. Michael looks at Ilana, still dumbstruck, still numb, still not ready. He wasn’t ready from day one isn’t sure what could have possibly made him think he’d be ready for something like this. Someone like Ilana.

He’s not powerful enough. He and everyone he trusts weren’t powerful enough.

He sets his jaw as Ilana’s eyes fall on him again.

“The cars are ten minutes west of the tower. Nobody will try to stop you, because there’ll be nobody there. They all came to me when I called. They’re all here.”

Michael looks around.

So many bodies on the floor it’s hard not to step on one. He must’ve stepped on several.

His stomach turns, and yet he just nods.

“We have to go,” he says.

Jason stares at him as if he may punch him in the face.

Caleb forces him out.

Luke gives him one look that he can’t read, and then Geordie another, and with that, he raises his brother’s unconscious body to over his shoulder, and limping, he carries him.

Ashton, still a panther bathed in blood, stands by his side.

Michael walks to Geordie, but doesn’t get too close.

His eyes have welled up too, but he won’t cry.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I am.”

Geordie offers him a sad half-smile, with a gun pressed to her forehead and a dead arm dropped boneless to her other side. “Go.”

Michael doesn’t look at Ilana again.

He trusts her madness to honor her agreement with Geordie.

And on his way down the stairs, as they all rush in the most absolute silence until they’re running, Michael knows, without a doubt, that Geordie will pull the trigger as soon as they’re safe.

He can hear her sacrifice in his bones, even before it happens.


	45. fill in the blanks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, you beautiful beautiful stars!!!! i hope the last weeks have been great for you guys ♥ i come bearing gifts!!! or, well, a gift. a chapter!!!! i hope you guys enjoy it!!!! it's much more a bridge for what's to come than anything else, but i put a lot of love into it, and hopefully it shows \^3^/~~~ ends of semester are always super busy and i definitely can't update as often as i used to, but i'm not going to abandon the story, so don't worry :3 ALRIGHTY, THAT'S A WHOLE LOT OF TALKING. there you go, chapter 45, hope you have fun!!! ♥♥♥

It feels as if silence echoes for months, but it’s really just miles.

They leave the abandoned amusement park in an old red pick-up truck that’s covered in dust and dried mud, but the key is in the ignition. There was no one there to stop them, like Ilana had predicted. Nobody but themselves, and that was a lot to deal with in itself. Nobody said a word as they climbed to their mutely assigned seats. 

Michael climbed to the driver’s seat even though he’s driven twice or three times all his life, and none had been in this situation. It’s just that Luke clings to Jack’s still unconscious body as he drags his big brother to the bed of the truck, and he doesn’t think anyone else will be able to drive if he doesn’t.

Jason helps Luke get Jack on the bed of the truck, and though Caleb avoids his eyes each and every time Jason murmurs his way, Caleb ends up agreeing to be with them on the bed of the car. That leaves still consistently high Ashton next to Michael on the front seats.

At first it’s as if he’s got his foot buried in the accelerator. He doesn’t want to slow down; can’t possibly let himself do that. He keeps checking the windshield mirror: first to see if Ilana is following them, to see if he caught an impossible noise of firegun, and if the bounty hunters camp is far away enough that it disappears. Then it’s just to keep checking on the others. Caleb falls asleep within the first half hour, maybe just too tired, and Jack doesn’t wake up, but Luke keeps his body close between his legs, like he’s just giving his brother a long hug. Jason cries, first angry sobs, then silent tears that won’t stop rolling down his freckled cheeks. 

Michael tells himself he needs to stop looking, but he can’t.

He can’t see Luke’s face from this angle, but he can see Jason, and he really wishes he couldn’t.

Ashton doesn’t speak to him, but for the first two hours of driving he’s shaking.

Michael pretends like he doesn’t notice. Ashton’s a naked boy covered in a blanket that’s now all-dirty with blood. It was a blanket that had at one point saved him, and now it’s dark red and brown, and Ashton’s pupils are still blown wide as his hands shake and his legs shake and his lips shake. 

There are still two doses of Opia left and Michael knows, he just _knows_ , that those will be used. More than worrying who exactly in their group will use them, he’s more concerned about against whom it’ll be.

“Daryl knew,” he says.

His voice is hoarse and Daryl’s name feels bitter in his tongue; he’d forgotten how it tasted. He’d been used to calling him _dad_ now, thinking of him as _father_ for even longer.

It’s the first thing Michael says in two hours, just when Ashton’s starting to look less out of it. He still blinks rapidly as he turns to look at Michael, says, “What,” and it doesn’t sound like a question, and then again, three times, once for each time he taps his nervous fingers against his thighs: “What, what, what.”

Michael takes a deep breath, and tries to keep his eyes on the road.

There’s not much to watch out for other than the gas level on the panel. They’ll have to stop at some point, but not any time soon. For now, he’ll just keep driving west, away from both mad Ilana and his lying father.

“I don’t know if he knew who she took, but he knew she was taking witches,” he says. “Definitely knew she hadn’t died when the Order attacked the human village all those months ago. Maybe he was working with her. For all we know, he’s the enemy.”

Ashton blinks a couple times more.

His legs aren’t shaking anymore, but his hands are a little, and his eyes are greener, sure, but every once in a while, Michael thinks he catches Ashton’s eyes turning all-white for just a split second. When it happens, he always winces.

Michael lets a few seconds expand between them, and when it’s clear Ashton isn’t going to say anything to that, Michael asks him:

“Does it hurt?”

Ashton raises his shoulders, and Michael looks at him.

He’s tear-eyed and his hair is a mess. He’s got a blond stubble on his face, but it just makes him look raw and dirty. He shakes his head no at first, and then yes, forcing a smile that is not a smile at all. “I just,” he starts, and then he shakes his head once more. “Michael, I know. I know Luke’s his brother. But he didn’t even look at me. Not even once. Didn’t even try to see if I was alive.”

Michael had meant the Opia after-effects, but he supposes a lot can hurt.

There’s nothing he can say to that either, so he keeps quiet.

He tries thinking about the living, focusing on Daryl’s betrayal, but all he can think about is Geordie.

* * *

It doesn’t take another fifteen minutes for someone to bang their fists against the division between the bed of the truck and the front seats. Michael would most certainly crash the car with the startle if there was anything to crash the car against. Instead he just ends up making an abrupt turn and hitting the brakes, making everyone swear and complain.

“Where did you buy your driver’s license, asshole?”

Jack. Michael turns around to see him, still looking pale but undoubtedly alive. He half-smiles, his stomach dropping in guilt of not knowing if anyone’s told Jack about Geordie, but he only listens to Jack because Jack yelled. It takes some further yelling from Jason, his fist still against the division, for him to understand:

“Gotta piss,” he says.

Michael nods and properly stops the car. They all get off at their own pace, moving to opposite directions to do what they need. Everyone does their business and then stalls, because apparently, none of them can handle the thought of being back in that damned red pick-up truck any longer.

Michael climbs up the bed of the car and watches Luke and Jack talking in the distance. He can’t hear them, but there’s lots of quiet yelling and angry faces, ample body gestures and Jack almost losing balance twice. Ashton is in their direct opposite path, sitting on the deserted arid ground on the blanket that Michael had come to love and now he can’t think clearly about.

Jason’s standing, looking at the distant sun that’s going to be setting soon, and Caleb walks to him, and sits on the bed of the car to his side. He’s limping, and his hand is holding the place where his other arm ends abruptly. Michael can’t look at him for too long, because then he has to think of Karen, and he doesn’t know what they’ll think of him when they find out that it’s his mother the reason all of this happened.

“I’m sorry we took so long,” Michael says, finally looking away from Luke and Jack.

Caleb doesn’t look back at him. 

His hair is oily, dirty with dried sweat and blood, and his nose is crooked, like someone may have broken it, but it was so long ago that he isn’t sure where it was supposed to hurt anymore. “If you keep going west, in a few hours you’re going to be at the beach.”

For a stupid stupid second his heart speeds up.

He’s never been to the beach. 

He raises his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

Caleb’s expression doesn’t change. “Ashton is going to need food and lots of rest because of the drug, otherwise he might get a heartattack and die. It’s happened before,” he pauses, for a split second, and then continues: “Luke and I need to sleep too. It’s been too long in there, and even without Opia, I think it’s just as likely we die if we don’t have a proper meal and sleep a full night. Plus,” he raises his eyebrows, eyes meeting Michael’s for the first time since they left Ilana’s lair. “Jason’s close to a mental breakdown. He needs some space to cope with what happened to Geordie. And… there’s Jack, too. He needs medication. If not, he’s going to die too.”

Michael sets his jaw. “Thought you didn’t like Jack.”

“I don’t. I’ve actually thought about his death plenty of times, most of them being the one causing it,” he tells Michael, conversationally enough that Michael wants to snort, but doesn’t. “But he’s the only person in this group who has the slightest idea what happened, so he can’t die.”

Though he’s tempted to ask him more, to ask him about Geordie, to ask him about the time they spent under Ilana’s care, he knows it’s not the time, especially not now. Caleb’s eyes are back to the horizon, and his lips are shut in a thin line. 

“How long until we reach the beach?” 

“Four, five hours. Six at most. But you had a full tank before you left, so we should be good.”

Michael feels like crying, like falling apart, but he needs to get everyone back in the car to keep driving. He takes a deep breath, tells himself it’s going to be alright, that it’s all going to work out; that they’re going to find help at the beach and that they’re going to find someone to trust, and nobody’s going to hurt anyone anymore.

Caleb’s still touching just around his elbow, quietly.

“Halsey, she… she thinks you’re dead. She thinks about you a lot.”

Caleb cocks an eyebrow. “I think a lot about her too. If it wasn’t for her, I would have never lost my arm, and I would have never been in hell.” 

Again, Michael feels there’s no strong enough argument against this.

As he yells at everyone to get back on the car and takes the driver’s seat himself, he thinks that maybe, only maybe, Geordie would be proud of him for not falling apart. He’s suppressing everything in a way that he knows is guaranteed to make everything worse later, but still, someone needs to keep going, someone needs to drive, someone needs to get them somewhere safe, so they can all yell and cry and hate each other and themselves.

He thinks of when he first met Geordie, after Luke and he jumped out of the Order Prison building, and Halsey and Geordie were their escape plan. He thinks of Geordie’s judgmental eyes and how they came to soften with time. He thinks of her coming back for them that day the Order Vultures bursted their motel room bubble. And he thinks maybe, just maybe, he may have come to be the type of person she’d approve of.

Somehow her approval means much more than Karen’s or Daryl’s. Especially now.

He allows himself this much, though: as everyone comes back to the car and he turns the key on the ignition, he allows himself one single tear to fall. 

And then they’re on the road again.


End file.
